Visakhapatnam: The Union Government has chosen Vizag to bring back aquaculture of the Indian shrimp species Penaeus monodon (tiger prawn) by at least in 2024. Efforts have also been made to set up a broodstock multiplication centre (BMC) required for specific pathogen free (SPF) tiger shrimp here at Rushikonda.
The Marine Products Export Development Authority (MPEDA) is undertaking the pilot project with funds under the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana in collaboration with the Ministry of Fisheries and the Department of Commerce.
The Vizag unit is intended for pilot scale purposes, while the full scale BMC will be established at Kanyakumari in Tamil Nadu.
The project was, in fact, first started by MPED through its research and development Rajiv Gandhi Centre for Aquaculture (RGCA) in 2005 in Andaman Islands and then fully established in 2014. Later, the demand for tiger prawns increased again. But to supply SPF brooders to hatchery operators for a mass production in mainland, the BMC at Vizag was planned and set up to raise parental post larvae (PPLs) from the Nucleus Breeding Center (NBC) in Andaman Island.
MPEDA Chairman KN Raghavan and RGCA Director S. Kandan reviewed the action plan initiated by the BMC for P.monodon in Vizag.
Sharing more details of the project with Deccan Chronicle, Raghavan said that to meet the demand from the industry for SPF tiger prawn seeds, the BMC-Vizag was selected and work would be completed in another 10 months.
Apart from this, the works of a mechanism to take up Shrimp Evaluation Study (SES) at Rajakkamangalam in Kanyakumari district to assess growth and reproductive performance of the SPF brooders of P. monodon coming to mainland India from the Domestication of Tiger Shrimp Project (DTSP) in Andaman Islands will also be ready by next seven to eight months.
From Andaman, juvenile P. monodon are brought to BMC-Vizag where they become parents (broodstock) which are given to hatcheries to produce SPF shrimp for importing countries from India.
“L.Vannami does not belong to our country. It is a Pacific region and hence it is an exotic species. P.monodon is our native species and pride of India. We can say this is our Make in India product,” Raghavan added.
