WWW.WAS.ORG • WORLD AQUACULTURE • SEPTEMBER 2017 51 cultured, especially in areas using higher salinity water for polyculture. Virtually all tilapia produced in India is sold in domestic markets as whole fish on ice. MPEDA has a licensing program for importation of broodstock to public and private hatcheries. Genetically Improved Farmed Tilapia (GIFT) have been imported in conjunction with WorldFish (Singh and Lakra 2011). GIFT fish are currently in a nucleus breeding program consisting of eight private and state department hatcheries. These hatcheries will be the authorized distributors of sexreversed GIFT tilapia. The currently operating hatcheries use α-methyl-testosterone to sex reverse fry for all-male production (Chakraborty and Banerjee 2009). This procedure is widely accepted around the world for tilapia destined for human consumption. Because the hormone is used at a low concentration for the first 21 days of feeding, there are no measurable residuals in the fish at harvest. The majority of tilapia hatcheries are privately owned stand-alone operations that sell to a network of grow out farmers. Survey Questionnaire Currently the national government has not been collecting data specific to tilapia production to report to the FAO. To collect the pertinent data, a telephone/email survey was conducted, consisting of interviews with ten fisheries and university contacts across India to determine importation and recent production figures. The ten survey participants were selected on the basis of their knowledge of local aquaculture, their acknowledged network of contacts and their professional positions. The participants included representatives from MPEDA, state fisheries departments of Andhra Pradesh, West Bengal, Kerala, Gujarat and Tamil Nadu Fisheries University. The questions in the survey included inquiries of regional production of all varieties of tilapia, grow-out systems in use, types of feeds and feeding methods, particular species and strains farmed, any post-harvest processing, transportation, market outlets and pricing. As of early 2017, the primary areas of tilapia production are in Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu while smaller amounts were reported in West Bengal, Gujarat and Kerala. Production on a commercial scale began in 2009 and continued to 2016 with estimates of production until 2020. The growth rate was especially rapid between 2010 and 2012. Growth in 2012 has been steady but not at the rapid rate of earlier years. In 2016, tilapia production was estimated to be 18,000 t (Fig. 2). The majority of tilapia currently produced in India are strains of Nile tilapia. The GIFT tilapia derived from the breeding programme at JITRA, Malaysia, coordinated by WorldFish, were introduced to the Central Institute of Freshwater Aquaculture (CIFA) in Bhubaneswar (Singh and Lakra 2011), and are now the most popular of the Nile tilapia strains. The Chitralada strain is also present in a few parts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. Red hybrid strains are cultured widely in inland saline areas of the Haryana region. Hatcheries are mostly privately owned and operated independently from farms. Hatcheries operate seasonally with most production coming in the spring and summer. Sex reversed male A Nile tilapia broodfish. (CONTINUED ON PAGE 52) A pond-in-pond system for holding tilapia breeders and juveniles. FIGURE 1. Tilapia production in India from 2009 to 2016, with anticipated production in 2020. The majority of tilapia production systems are pond-based polyculture with Indian major carps. There is also interest in polyculture with marine shrimps as there are multiple reports of reduction in virulence of shrimp diseases when grown in polyculture with tilapias.
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