CIFRI Awards
Inland open waters usually cover rivers, reservoirs and wetlands, which are facing big challenges for maintaining suitable water quality for fisheries. For quality fisheries production, water health management is one of the crucial aspect which help fishes to disease free survival, good growth and quality habitat. Inland fisheries are mainly suffering from poor water quality due to fish pathogens, fish disease, macrophyte infestation, pollutants from different sources etc. Fishermen usually treat the waterbodies by manual spraying of disinfects, pesticides, herbicides with hours of labors and high input cost. In this scenario, the new technology sprayer drone may act as an efficient tool to do the things with less time, input and cost due to smart automated technology.
To aware the fishermen about the technology, ICAR-Central Inland Fisheries Research Institute (CIFRI), Barrackpore has organized three awareness program on “Demonstration of Drone Technology in Inland Open Water Fisheries” in three wetlands of West Bengal viz. Chamta wetland, North 24 Parganas; Khalsi wetland, Nadia and Sindrani wetland, North 24 Parganas on 11.4.2023, 12.4.2023 and 13.4.2023 respectively under the ICAR Agri-Drone project coordinated by ICAR-ATARI, Kolkata. These awareness programs were planned under the supervision and guidance of Dr. B. K. Das, Director, ICAR-CIFRI aiming to educate the farmers about the scope of the technology in their fish farming. In the program, Mr. Kausik Mondal, Technical officer and drone pilot of ICAR-CIFRI has briefed about the drone system and its applications in the field.
After that Agri-drone system was operated to fly over the waterbodies and sprayed disinfects in the water area. Ms. Chayna Jana, Scientist & Coordinator of the project interacted with the farmers and discussed about the benefits of the technology. Fishermen also took active part to know about the technology and showed their interest to use the system in their fish farming specially for macrophyte controls, pesticide and disinfect spraying. A total of 120 fishermen were present in these three awareness programs.
