Marine Fishery Regulations and Policies for Conservation in India

India, being one of the largest marine fisheries in the world, has high stakes in managing its coastal and marine resources. The marine resources in India are highly diverse comprising of an exclusive economic zone of 2.02 million km2 besides a continental shelf area of nearly 0.50 million square kilometers. The capture fisheries sector in India, though experienced a rapid expansion in the recent decades with the advent of mechanized fishing during 1980s, has started showing signs of over capitalization and consequent crises. Experts in the field have already highlighted the impending problems such as declining catch rate and diminishing returns, overfishing and /juvenile fishing leading to depletion of fish stock, rampant destruction of marine biota due to high-intensity trawling, and so on (Devaraj and Vivekanandan,1999; Ramachandran, 2004). The imminent crisis is increasingly getting reflected through frequent conflicts between various groups/factions of fishermen/vessel operators over their rights and shares over the resources. These circumstances echo the need for a strong regulatory and management regime for protecting and preserving the maritime resources of the sub-continent. Though India is not new to regulations in fisheries sector with a number of laws and rules in place for more than a century, the emerging scenario merits a relook into the existing regulatory framework. Against this backdrop, this chapter presents global approaches to marine fisheries regulations along with a broad overview and critical appraisal of India’s marine fishery regulations and policies aimed at conservation and sustainable development