Inland Fisheries

3.2.3 The Brahmaputra river system

          The combined length of the Brahmaputra riverine system is 4,023 km. It originates from a great glacier near Mansarovar Lake. It is slightly longer than the Indus, but most of its course lies outside India. It flows eastward, parallel to the Himalayas. It traverses for its first 1,600 km through Tibet, where it is known as ‘Tsangpo‘. There, it receives less volume of water and has less silt. But in India, it passes through a region of heavy rainfall and as such, the river carries a large amount of rainfall and considerable amount of silt.

          Afer flowing through Tibet, it flows through Arunachal Pradesh, Assam and Bangladesh. Then, it joins the Ganga at Golaundo. After confluencing with Ganga, the united rivers flow under the name of Padma reaching the Bay of Bengal through the Great Maghna estuary. It has got a large number of tributaries. The Brahmaputra valley is marked for its abandoned river beds, which are subjected to annual inundations. These areas are called, beels. It drains the northern slopes of the Central and Eastern Himalayas, Assam, Bhutan, Sikkim and parts of Northwest Bengal. The total catchment area of this river in India is 1,87,110 km² (51 million ha). It has a rich fish fauna of torrential streams in its upper reaches (low economic value) and its middle and lower reaches have several species of carps, catfishes and air breathing fishes, anadromous Hilsa (high economic value).