Knowledge level of the fishers on sustainable development measures of rasik beel fisheries: An exploratory study

Wetland is a broad term which encompasses a wide range of permanent-fresh water or shallow coastal waters. Among the Indian States, West Bengal has the second-largest area under wetlands, mainly associated with the Ganga, covering 8, 43, 221 hector areas. Wetlands food chain provides fish and wildlife habitat, nutrient cycling, sediment trapping, socioeconomic values, sites for research and education, heritage and even aesthetic values. However, due to various development activities, intensive urbanization, anthropogenic pressures, and deterioration of beels water quality resulted in prolific weed growth, declined bio-diversity, and other associated problems. To improve the production of these potential resources, sustainable approaches are needed to improve its products and maintain ecological balance. Sustainable Development Approach, understanding beel user's knowledge level is imperative in this direction. The study was conducted at Rasik Beel in the Coochbehar district of West Bengal to observe the impact of communicational and managerial variables on the knowledge level of beel users for the Sustainable Development of beel fisheries. The study's finding revealed that the communicational variable, i.e. utilization of information source, was a significant and positive variable associated with (p<0.01) with beel user's knowledge level. Further managerial attributes like training need, borrowing habit and the saving habit were found to have a significant and positive association (p<0.01) with beel users’ knowledge level. Whereas the decision-making process and fishing effort were found to have no association with knowledge level. But, beel users’ information-seeking behaviour for sustainable development of beel fisheries was the most substantially contributing variable (t“-value: 7.369886**) among these four significant variables. So, concerted educational and communicational efforts are needed to educate and aware the beel users for sustainable development of beel fisheries.