Inland Fisheries

The Brahmaputra River System

The combined length of the Brahmaputra riverine system is 4,023 km. It originates from a great glacier near Mansarowar 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, Bangladesh. 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).

Fish and Fisheries of the Brahmaputra river system

A total of 126 species of fishes belonging to 26 families have been recorded from this system. Of these, 41 species are known to have commercial importance. Catfishes (mainly Wallago attu) and major (mainly Rohu) and minor carps dominate the commercial catches of upper, middle and lower stretches, while the commercial catch in lower-middle stretch is primarily composed of catfish and miscellaneous catch. The species found in the Himalayas include Tor spp, Glyptothorax spp, Balitora spp, Noemacheilus spp, Schizothorax spp, Lepidocephalichthys spp, Gagata spp etc. The major fishes present in this system include Labeo gonius, Wallago attu, Puntius sarana, Notopterus notopeterus, N. chitala, Mystus seenghala, Clupisoma gainia and Eutropiichthys vacha. A survey conducted by CIFRI, Barrackpore indicates that there is significant decline in the fishery in many stretches of the river. Mahseers, once plentiful in the upstream stretches of rivers, are already under the threat of extinction.

Fishing gears used

Dip net, cast net, gill net, purse net, drag net, trawl net, bag net, long lines etc., are the fishing gears commonly employed in the Brahmaputra system.