Govt floats experimental method to put a value on marine fish resources

NSO proposes valuing marine fish resources through expected future resource rents, with stock sustainability and asset life determining their monetary value

The National Statistics Office (NSO) on Thursday released a concept paper outlining an experimental method to compile monetary asset accounts for India's marine fish resources, treating fish resources as both biological resources and economic assets within an environmental-economic accounting framework.

 

The paper applies the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's (2025) Measuring Natural Resources in the National Accounts: A Compilation Guide within the System of Environmental-Economic Accounting (SEEA) framework and seeks to build both physical and monetary "asset accounts" for fish, species by species.

 

Under the proposed approach, the monetary value of fish resources is estimated using the net present value (NPV) of expected future resource rents over each species' asset life.

  

Resource rent is the economic surplus generated by a natural resource after accounting for all production costs, including labour and capital, capturing the resource’s true economic value.

 

“Conventional national accounts such as Gross Value Added (GVA) do not distinguish between returns to fishing capital and returns to the natural fish resource, thereby masking depletion of natural wealth even when fisheries output remains high,” the paper highlighted.

 

The ministry reckoned that this made resource rent "critical for assessing whether fisheries are generating genuine long-term wealth or progressively depleting the country's natural capital base."

 

The paper states that India is the second-largest fish-producing country in the world and accounts for 8 per cent of global production, with total production in FY25 estimated at 19.77 million metric tonnes, of which 4.61 MMT (about 23.3 per cent) came from the marine sector.

 

Marine product exports stood at 1.70 MMT, valued at ₹62,408.45 crore ($7.45 billion), and the sector supports approximately 28 million fishers and fish farmers.

 

Due to the unavailability of certain data, the ministry proposed using long-term landing records — the net weight of fish that is actually brought ashore and recorded at landing centres — for formal stock assessments.

 

"The landing time-series method may be adopted as a practical proxy approach for determining the sustainability status of fish stocks and estimating asset life under existing Indian data conditions," the paper stated, drawing on landings compiled by the ICAR-Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI), for which national data go back to 2004.

 

Species are classified as developing, exploited, overexploited, rebuilding or collapsed by comparing current landings with the historical maximum. Asset life is then assigned: 25 years for exploited stocks treated as sustainably managed, 10 years for overexploited or rebuilding stocks, and five years for collapsed ones. These values feed the NPV calculation, using a recommended 2 per cent real discount rate.

 

“Accurate and transparent monetary validation of fish resources will serve as a foundational input for data-driven policymaking and sustainable development,” the ministry concluded.