India's coastal fisheries face overexploitation while deep-sea resources remain underutilised. Analyse the causes and suggest a policy roadmap.

India is the world's second-largest fish producer, contributing about 8% of global output and supporting nearly 30 million livelihoods [1]. Yet fishing effort crowds the narrow continental shelf, while the EEZ's estimated potential yield of 7.16 million tonnes stays largely untapped [1] — a structural mismatch between effort and resource.

Causes of coastal overexploitation

• Open-access commons on the shelf, with fleet overcapacity and mechanised trawlers chasing shrinking near-shore stocks.
• Perverse subsidy design that rewards fishing effort rather than sustainable practice, keeping uneconomic vessels at sea [1].
• Destructive gear and juvenile capture, weakly policed under fragmented state marine fishing regulation Acts.
• Habitat degradation from pollution and shipping accidents; CMLRE found the ELSA 3 wreck contaminated plankton, benthos and fish larvae off Kerala [4].

Causes of deep-sea underutilisation

• Capital barrier: shortage of modern, GPS- and cold-chain-equipped deep-sea vessels; high fuel and voyage costs with no insurance cover [1].
• Knowledge gap: resource maps rest on episodic exploratory surveys of the slope and oceanic waters, not continuous stock assessment [3].
• Regulatory vacuum: absence of a dedicated EEZ fisheries law harmonised with UNCLOS, and thin institutional and scientific manpower [1].
• Skill and access deficits: distant-water fishing needs regional fisheries agreements and trained crews that traditional fishers lack.

Policy roadmap

• Enact a national EEZ Fisheries Act and create a Deep-Sea Fisheries Authority as single-window regulator [1].
• Establish a Deep-Sea Fishing Development Fund with PPPs, soft loans and insurance; incentivise cooperative vessel ownership so small fishers migrate outward rather than exit [1].
• Adopt ecosystem-based catch limits, marine spatial planning and real-time vessel tracking [1].
• Strengthen the science backbone — sustained FORV Sagar Sampada surveys and taxonomic infrastructure like the "Bhavasagara" national deep-sea fauna repository [3][5].

Shifting effort seaward is therefore not merely an output goal but the means of relieving the coast. A rights-based, data-led transition — funded, regulated and community-owned — can align India's Blue Economy with SDG-14, converting an over-fished shelf and an idle deep sea into one sustainably managed ocean commons.