Through which of the following factors the fisheries development program is implemented effectively ?
(a) The Fishery Survey of India.
(b) National fisheries development board.
(c) Development of fish

Question

Through which of the following factors the fisheries development program is implemented effectively ?
(a) The Fishery Survey of India.
(b) National fisheries development board.
(c) Development of fishing harbours.
(d) Meat Marketing.
Answer options :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), statements (a), (b) and (c). The stem asks through which factors the fisheries development programme is effectively implemented, and three of the four items named are genuine instruments of fisheries development while the fourth belongs to a different sector altogether. Statement (a), the Fishery Survey of India, is the resource-assessment arm: headquartered in Mumbai and working under the Department of Fisheries, it surveys the fishery resources of India's exclusive economic zone by research vessel, estimates what stocks exist and where, and supplies the scientific basis without which any development effort would be guesswork about how much fish can be taken and from where. Statement (b), the National Fisheries Development Board, is the coordination and funding arm: established in 2006 and based at Hyderabad, it was created as an autonomous body precisely to give fisheries a single national agency for planning, funding and implementing development activity across inland and marine sub-sectors. Statement (c), the development of fishing harbours, is the infrastructure arm: harbours and fish landing centres are the physical points at which a catch is landed, iced, graded and sold, and without them a fleet cannot operate safely or a catch reach market without spoiling — which is why harbour and landing-centre construction is a standing component of central fisheries schemes. Statement (d), meat marketing, is the odd one out: meat belongs to livestock and animal husbandry, a related but separate line of activity, and it does nothing to implement a fisheries programme. So the three that belong are (a), (b) and (c), and option (3) is the only choice that names exactly those three.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This option correctly keeps the Fishery Survey of India and the National Fisheries Development Board but drops (c), the development of fishing harbours, and there is no ground for dropping it. A fisheries programme is not implemented by institutions alone; a fleet needs somewhere to berth, land its catch, take on ice and fuel and be repaired, and a catch needs a landing point with cold storage if it is to reach a market in saleable condition. Harbour and landing-centre development is accordingly a standing component of India's central fisheries schemes, not an optional extra, and the option that excludes it treats the administrative machinery as the whole programme.  (b) This option brings in (d), meat marketing, in place of the fishing-harbour item. Meat marketing belongs to the livestock and animal husbandry side of the same ministry, not to fisheries: it concerns slaughterhouses, meat processing plants, hygiene standards and the sale of animal meat, and none of that implements a fisheries development programme. The two sectors are administered together in India, which is exactly why the distractor is plausible, but administrative proximity is not the same as functional relevance, and the option compounds the error by also dropping the genuinely relevant harbour item.  (d) This is the weakest of the three wrong options because it keeps only one relevant item, (c) fishing harbours, pairs it with the irrelevant (d) meat marketing, and discards both of the institutions that actually run fisheries development in India. Excluding the Fishery Survey of India removes the source of resource assessment, and excluding the National Fisheries Development Board removes the body set up in 2006 to coordinate and fund fisheries development nationally. An answer that keeps infrastructure while dropping both the survey and the development board describes no workable programme.

Concept: Fisheries development in India is organised around three distinct functions, and the question is built on the distinction between them. The first is resource assessment — finding out what fish exist, in what quantity and in which waters — which is the work of the Fishery Survey of India, operating survey vessels across the exclusive economic zone. The second is institutional coordination and funding, which since 2006 has been the role of the National Fisheries Development Board at Hyderabad, an autonomous body created to give a scattered sector a single national agency. The third is physical infrastructure: fishing harbours, fish landing centres, cold chains, ice plants and market linkages, without which neither science nor funding reaches the fisherman. The administrative structure above all three was raised in importance in 2019, when a separate Department of Fisheries was created and then placed under a dedicated Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, and the sector's flagship scheme, the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana, was launched in 2020 to bring resource management, infrastructure and welfare measures under a single programme.

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