Socio-economic Characteristics of Fishermen and Constraints in Adoption of Information and Communication Technology in Coastal Regions of Andhra Pradesh

The study was conducted in the East Godavari and Visakhapatnam districts of Andhra Pradesh to determine Socio-economic characteristics of fisher folk and to explore the constraints for adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in marine capture fisheries. The data were collected through personal interview technique from 120 fishermen, who were actively engaged in marine fishing. The results revealed that the occupation of majority fisher folk was exclusively fishing. They spent 10–15 hr in fishing on each fishing day, undertook fishing for more than 20-25d in a month and with an average of 8-10m in a year. A majority of the respondents harvested more than 300kg of fish on a fishing day and sailing 20–60 Nm from the shore, operated their gears in the depth of 80–120 m and their vessels had more than five tones of fish holding capacity. For a majority of the fisher folk, the annual income was more than Rs.1.5 lakh, annual expenditure more than rupees one lakh and thus, the annual saving in the range of Rs. 15, 000-45, 000/-annum. Most of the respondents have operated mechanized fishing vessels and gears such as gillnet, hook and line and trawl net for fishing. The major constraints reported by the respondents were financial support for the purchase of high cost ICT instruments (97.50%), the language problem in understanding the application of ICT gadgets (91.67%) and lack of knowledge on operation of ICT tools.