Small Native Fishes as a Food Based Route to Better Nutrition in Assam

Assam has some of the highest rates of anaemia and child undernutrition in India, even though fish turns up in almost every household meal. Small indigenous fish species (SIS) such as moa, puthi, darikona and chanda grow to about 25 cm at most. They live in the beels, rivers, paddy fields and ditches of the Brahmaputra and Barak valleys, and families usually cook and eat them whole, heads and bones included. Eaten this way they give vitamin A, calcium, iron, zinc, vitamin B12 and long chain omega 3 fatty acids in amounts that large farmed carps cannot match. Assamese cooking already makes good use of these fishes, yet wild stocks are shrinking as wetlands are drained, embankments cut rivers off from their floodplains and rice fields receive more pesticide. Growing mola together with carps in homestead ponds, letting fishing communities manage the beels, improving the drying and fermentation of small fish and adding small fish products to public food programmes could keep them on the plate. Small fishes give Assam a cheap and familiar way to reduce micronutrient deficiency, as long as fisheries policy starts to count nutrients as well as tonnes.