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Aquaculture and fisheries technology
India farms more fish than ever, a record 197.75 lakh tonnes in 2024-25, and the growth is being pushed into systems that use very little water. Two of them carry the scheme money, recirculating tanks and biofloc ponds, and both work by raising the fish stocked per unit of water rather than by asking for more pond and more land.
UPSC has asked
- Prelims 2023: biofilters in Recirculating Aquaculture Systems
Farming fish on little water
- The biofilter of a Recirculatory Aquaculture System converts the ammonia in fish waste first into nitrite and then into nitrate, which is what lets the system reuse 90 to 95 per cent of its water and stock its tanks intensively all year.
- Biofloc technology, or heterotrophic pond farming, needs no filter: beneficial microbes grown in the pond water itself clump together, cleaning the water and serving as feed, so little or no water is exchanged.
- Both are supported under the Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY), launched in 2020 on the base of the earlier Blue Revolution scheme.
What has happened
7 Sep 2026
Two Press Information Bureau (PIB) releases set out recirculating and biofloc systems as the next generation of Indian aquaculture, alongside a record fish output of 197.75 lakh tonnes in 2024-25, more than double that of 2013-14.
- India is second in world fish production, at about 8 per cent of global output, and first in shrimp production and exports.
PIB, 7 Sep 2026: Next-Gen Aquaculture in India: Harnessing RAS and Bio-floc Technology in the Blue Economy for the Atmanirbhar Bharat and Viksit Bharat Vision (opens in a new tab) · PIB, 10 Sep 2026: Fueling the Blue Economy: Six Years of Empowering India's Fisheries Sector under PMMSY (opens in a new tab)