Community Based Fisheries Management in Bangladesh
Kaliganga River
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The waterbody Kaliganga consists of parts of the river Kaliganga, Chitra and the Donger Khal. It is located in the district of Bagerhat. The Fourth Fisheries Project started here in 2000 and intervened by constructing several sanctuaries.
The PWB has some unique features. First, it has two parts - Kaliganga and Chitra. Kaliganga is almost dead - it is difficult for a fisher to sustain a livelihood contingent on the stock of fish available there. In contrast, the Chitra is vibrant. It is the main source of saline water and naturally produced shrimp fingerlings used in neighbouring shrimp farms. Second, shrimp is the major source of livelihoods and the project households have diversified their livelihoods towards shrimp aquaculture and on activities based on it. Third, the households living in the project villages are all Hindu and divided into two castes: the Nomosudras and the Rajbongshis. The former is involved in farming and the latter is involved in fishing. As the fertility of Kaliganga waned and the dependence of the households on Chitra grew - caste norms started to crumble.
Under these circumstances the FFP created local institutions that aimed at banning fishing gears such as patagora and kumor that mainly cater for target species - shrimp fingerlings. The Nomosudra shrimp farmers and cultivators dominate these institutions and the Rajbongshi fishers are almost pushed to the sidelines. It was relatively easy for the FMC to keep the banned gears away in Kaliganga because shrimp fingerlings are hardly available there. On the other hand the FMC totally failed to implement FMP in Chitra. The fishers around Chitra are highly organised and continue to retain their de facto territorial rights. Although the caste conflict is still there and plays an important role in many ways, it is not easy to understand why the elites who captured the FMCs and VDCs drafted an FMP that does not serve their interests. These elite lacks the social power to control Chitra. They never planned or attempted to implement FMP by using state's coercive powers. So far their power base helped them to collect a nominal amount of fees from the fishers who are extremely poor. On the face of it all the actors of community management are there: the FMC, the VDCs, the NGO. The state is also there in the Upazilla Sadar: the TNO, SUFO and so on. Others are a bit far away - in the districts of Bagerhat and Dhaka. But they remain foreign to the project households. They are neither trusted nor respected but strongly suspected by the project households. These institutions only worked well to facilitate transfer of resources from the power elites in the centre to the power elites at the local level.