Women In Fisheries: Roles, Constraints and Recommendations

Around 28 million people are involved in India’s fisheries sector, of whom 44 percent are women. This article maps the roles women play across the full arc of the fisheries sector—pre-harvest activities, fish seed and seaweed collection, processing, marketing, aquaculture—and catalogues the structural constraints that define their working conditions at each stage. Eighty-six percent of marine fisherfolk involved in marketing are women. About 90-95 percent of those involved in curing, processing, and prawn-peeling are women. Yet women remain almost entirely absent from skill-intensive roles in aquaculture management such as monitoring water quality, disease management, and feed formulation. This is largely because extension services and technology programmes have systematically excluded them.

The paper also documents working conditions that include seaweed harvesters diving to 15 metres without protective equipment, processing plant workers developing frostbite and musculoskeletal disorders from years of floor-level posture, and cold exposure. Marketing and processing also pose problems due to poor market infrastructure that is largely male-dominated, less credit access, and lack of amenities (toilets, lighting, safe waiting areas) at centralised markets which exposes them to sexual harassment and abuse. To address these issues, the authors recommend the collection of gender-disaggregated data in the fisheries sector, improving credit access for women fisherfolk, and improving market infrastructure and access. The paper provides an expansive, nation-wide overview, covering the breadth of women’s roles and challenges in fisheries across coastal and inland regions, with some regional disaggregation for Assam, Telangana, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Jammu and Kashmir.