Opportunities and challenges in innovating for coastal fishing

What they miss out on within the primary methods is the cloud-based information play, particularly large information analytics to optimize routes and productiveness, as a result of real-time information is just saved on the gadget.

This places them at an enormous drawback to bigger, well-equipped Chinese language trawlers within the worldwide waters of the Bay of Bengal and Arabian Sea.

Kanyakumari startup Odaku has give you an inexpensive workaround to this downside. It has a SaaS (software-as-a-service) product that may present the navigation in addition to analytics with cloud help. This may be put in on any appropriate pill or smartphone, leaving the selection of gadget to the fisherman in accordance with what fits his funds. The startup can be making an attempt to tailor the product to native wants.

“Indian fishermen use conventional data for fishing on our shoreline. We’re baking that into our product,” says Xavier Lawrance, founding father of Odaku, who labored as an app developer within the US and Singapore earlier than turning into an entrepreneur in his residence state of Tamil Nadu.

Digital assistant

For instance, skilled fishermen know the place they’ll get a great catch. In addition they know rock formations underwater that would snag their nets. Such particulars would usually be famous in a logbook, however as soon as digitized on the cloud and collated with information from different fishermen, the fisherman’s visualization could be extra highly effective.

Odaku’s product is getting used on 1,700 primarily medium-sized mechanized fishing boats, every using 30-50 individuals. So, it has a big potential impression on the fishing group as a complete, and never simply the boat house owners.

The app has a number of different options, like climate alerts. However what units it aside, in accordance with Lawrance, is the best way it communicates with its customers.

“There are a number of NGOs coming into this house and the federal government additionally pushes numerous options, however most of them are designed for regular customers,” he says.

“When an individual goes out to sea, he makes use of a sea language. That’s the place there’s a hole between the fishing group and the tech people who find themselves constructing options for them. Since I come from their area, I perceive what they want and talk information to them,” he provides.

Lawrance’s household has been in fishing historically, and he nonetheless goes out to fish within the ocean.

Odaku illustrates the type of tech improvements that may make an impression on fishing. Most startups have centered on inland fish farms, particularly shrimp, which has a profitable export market. Farmed fishing is extra predictable and simpler to regulate for tech intervention, however marine fishing has the potential to make a big effect, contemplating the sheer variety of individuals concerned in it.

Aside from assist with fishing itself, alternatives abound all alongside the provision chain, from grading and high quality checks to extra dependable chilly chain methods and market linkages to disrupt conventional distribution. An rising space is traceability, which turns into way more doable with digitization and information. This offers visibility on what’s within the chain.

“A B2B provide firm can then use the information not solely to make sure fulfilment based mostly on orders but additionally to do it in minimal time with out degradation of high quality,” says Krishnan Neelakantan, managing companion at Ankur Capital, which lately invested in a startup that’s constructing a platform that may allow traceability as nicely.

This will get extra complicated for marine fishing than for inland fisheries or agriculture due to the variety of species, their seasonality and the shape issue—that’s, the size which is probably not as commonplace as for farmed fish.

“So, the primary proposition of information analytics is to assist match fragmented end-demand with a heterogeneous and unorganized provide chain in an optimum method,” says Neelakantan.

Very important ingredient

Improvements to rework the provision chain are very important to alter shopper behaviour into acceptance of tech platforms, which can in flip create demand and drive the adoption of tech by fishermen. Prospects can then be assured of the identical consistency that you simply get with farmed fish.

Proper now, diehard customers desire to go to the market and decide their very own fish, primarily as a result of they’re uncertain of what they are going to get with an internet order.

Covid-19 has put a crimp in that inefficient system, however tech platforms should evolve to offer extra worth at each ends of the chain—the fishermen and customers. This is applicable much more to India, the place individuals desire recent fish, than in lots of nations within the West the place frozen seafood has turn into part of on a regular basis life.

Malavika Velayanikal is a Consulting Editor with Mint. She tweets @vmalu