Messages From Space Tell Indians Where To Fish
The program is currently available for a fifth of the nation’s coastal fishermen.
(Bloomberg) -- Pure luck used to determine whether Palani Manickaswamy caught any fish or returned empty-handed to his village on the southeast coast of India. Messages from space changed all that.
Manickaswamy, 26, gets a voicemail every evening proffering tips on where in the Bay of Bengal he should cast his net the next morning. The automated calls are based on analyses from space of oceanographic and weather data known to influence the movement of fish.
“The one time I didn’t heed the advice, I ended up losing money,” said Manickaswamy, who uses satellite navigation to guide his 68-foot, diesel-powered boat to recommended spots as far as 300 nautical miles (556 kilometers) offshore to catch tuna. “Earlier, even if the fish were close to the coast, we’d have missed them. Now, we don’t.”
The advice generated by a constellation of satellites 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) above earth makes business more efficient for thousands of fishermen like Manickaswamy and boosts India’s export sales, which quadrupled to $5.6 billion from 2004 to 2014. It’s also made the maritime industry a major beneficiary of the Indian space agency’s $1.09 billion budget.
The program Manickaswamy uses is based on a partnership between the Indian Space Research Organisation and the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services. It capitalizes on the world’s fastest-growing smartphonemarket, where sales in the third quarter grew 11 percent from a year earlier, according to International Data Corp.
It’s currently available for a fifth of the nation’s coastal fishermen. Prime Minister Narendra Modi plans to roll it out for all of them along the country’s 7,517 kilometers of marine coastline.
The volume of fish brought ashore from the Eastern Indian Ocean, which includes the Bay of Bengal, the world’s largest bay, has increased 50 percent to 7.7 million metric tons in the last decade, according to the 2016 State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. Of the planet’s major fish suppliers, India had the fastest growth in export sales from 2004 to 2014, it said.
At the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services in the southern city of Hyderabad, scientists led by M. Nagaraja Kumar study sea-surface temperature data on their computer screens, interpreting information that will be dispatched to fishermen in free automated text and audio messages, posted on bulletin boards and relayed by local broadcasters.
It’s estimated the service helps recipients save as much as 70 percent of their time, 500 kiloliters (132,100 gallons) of diesel, and 804 tons of carbon emissions annually, Kumar said. As a result, regular users can pocket an additional 50,000 rupees ($750) a year.
“We built this boat on a loan,” Manickaswamy said at the shoreline. “We’re repaying that loan with the extra money that we get.”
That helps make the nation’s space program a worthwhile investment of taxpayer money, Kumar said. ISRO also launches satellites to help fellow government agencies forecast and track tropical cyclones to minimize fatalities, provide farmers with more detailed flood and drought forecasts, and monitor the nation’s biodiversity to assess the impact of climate change.
“The benefits that are accrued through this are much higher than the cost of the satellite,” Kumar said in an e-mail. “This service saves time and brings fresher fish to land, preserving nutritional value. The economic and environmental benefits are high.”
With assistance by Alyssa McDonald
Design and development: Adrian Leung, Cedric Sam, Yue Qiu, Hannah Dormido