Socio-economic study of fish farmers of Kishanganj district of Bihar

Formulating schemes and policies for the economic benefit of fish farmers, the prerequisite is to know the base line (socio-economic) data of fish farmers of area under consideration. Considering this, the present study was conducted in the Kishanganj district of Bihar. Pre-structured interview schedule was used to collect the data and four blocks namely Bahadurganj, Kochadhaman, Pothia and Thakurganj were purposively selected. 45 respondents from each block, altogether 180 respondents from all four selected blocks were selected by using simple random sampling. Study revealed that more than 59 percent of the respondents were under the productive age group, majority of the respondents belonged to Hindu religion, and literacy rate of the respondents was very poor and almost 70.56% of the respondents were illiterate to functionally literate. Study revealed that family members, neighbours and friends were the most oftenly used source of information. Majority of the responds had mobile phone which can be used for the dissemination of information. The income form fish culture was not up to the mark and almost all respondents had low income from fisheries activity and only 2.78 per cent respondents had income of 1 to 2 lakh from activities related to fisheries.