GOVERNMENT OF BIHAR - Animal & Fish Resources

Fisheries Policy 2008education to every child, housing, safe drinking water and otheramenities, and group accident insurance coverage to 2,00,000 activefishers, fishing gears, and aqua farms, etc. Registration of fishermen andissue of ID cards for fishers and their family members would be done asa mandatory measure. Effective and fast assistance would be ensuredfrom the Calamity Relief Fund, insurance companies and other suchinstitutions. The Department will coordinate mobilisation of all theresources to provide welfare services to fishing communities likehousing, drinking water facility, primary health care, compulsoryprimary education for all fishers’ children by 2012, community centres,etc. Fisher women and children would receive greater attention.16. Fisheries Co-operativesPresently, the co-operative societies are plagued by economicinefficiencies, absence of democratic processes, mismanagement andmisappropriation of benefits by the dominant few, lack of transparencyand accountability, etc. The policy is alive to the fact that activeinterventions are necessary to strengthen and restructure Fisheries CooperativeSocieties in order to make them as a democratic grass rootlevel engine of fisheries development, and ensure equity of benefitsparticularly to their poor fisher members.The policy strives to initiate following measures to ensure greaterdegree of accountability and equity: creating wider awareness aboutthe rights and responsibilities of members and democratization ofelection processes; all societies shall have joint account preferably innationalized banks; all members shall have photo ID cards and the listto be available for public scrutiny; incentives and awards to bestperforming societies based on over all production as well as socioeconomicparameters; power of registration of societies andsettlement of their disputes to be given to Dept. of Animal and FishResources as in other neighbouring States of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar21