Bhubaneswar: A tripartite Memorandum of Agreement (MoA) was signed today between Odisha Integrated Irrigation Project for Climate Resilient Agriculture (OIIPCRA); Director of Fisheries, and WorldFish to support the climate-resilient aquaculture practices in the state.
The MoA was signed in the presence of Development Commissioner-cum-ACS Department of Water Resources (DoWR) Anu Garg, Principal Secretary, Fisheries and ARD Suresh Kumar Vashisth & Principal Secretary, A&FE Dr Arabinda Kumar Padhee, in a programme organized at DoWR Conference Hall of Rajiv Bhawan.
Director of Fisheries, Odisha Smrutiranjan Pradhan, Director, OIIPCRA Rashmiranjan Nayak and WorldFish, India, Team Head Arun Padhiyar signed the MoA.
Notably, OIIPCRA is being implemented in 15 districts of the State with support of the World Bank, through Odisha Community Tank Development & Management Society (OCTDMS), a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) under DoWR with the objective to intensify and diversify agricultural production and enhance climate resilience under four components: climate-smart intensification and diversion of production; improving access to irrigation and water productivity; institutional capacity strengthening and project management.
Besides, improving availability and irrigation through 538 tanks, the project is taking up cross-sectoral convergence of water, agriculture, horticulture and fisheries sectors to benefit farmers through increased quality of irrigation service; average yields; marketable outputs; diversified incomes; climate resilience etc.
In the Fisheries sector, activities are being taken up under the aquaculture production sub-component are in promoting climate-resilient aquaculture practices in 263 MIPs to increase the ability of small-scale farmers and promotion of species diversification through polyculture.
This project has helped in the capacity building of stakeholders for enhancing knowledge on aquatic food production systems and to strengthen community-based institutional architecture and promotion of intensive aquaculture through the adoption of new technologies such as bio-floc fish farming technology.
Demonstration of freshwater prawn nurseries to produce quality prawn juveniles by farmers and the community has become possible where as small feed mixing and pelletizer plant to local community organizations to promote supplementary feeding by farmers using locally available fish feed has been provided.
Also water testing kits to farmers engaged in fish farming in MIP, individual tanks, and bio-floc in order to monitor water quality parameters for adaptive measures to increase fish production in this climate changing scenario have been supplied. Fish farmers have been provided with drag nets for harvesting fish and three and four wheelers with ice box for strengthening post-harvest marketing infrastructure.
This MoA will support implementation of different activities and induce good practices.
This will assist to monitor and evaluate the programmes and activities including realtime tracking by integrating the Decision Support System of FARD with the OIIPCRA application, conduct orientations and workshops for the stakeholders, prepared the technical contents for various IEC materials such as training manuals, leaflets, posters, video documentaries for all schemes & activities under the project, prepare the scheme implementation guidelines for all schemes and activities under the project, conduct exposure visits, review of the aquaculture sub-component of the project by involving all DFOs, concerned block level AFOs, SOs, UNDP DPMs etc.
This will also assess the project interventions through schemes by conducting crop outcome surveys with the preparation of periodic project reports.
APD, OIIPCRA Saroj Kanta Das, other senior officers of OIIPCRA, A&FE, F&ARD including DoWR were present on this occasion.
