The state of AJK is rich in water resource and fish fauna. The water resource ranges from cold water in northern districts to typical warm water in the southern districts. The available fish fauna also exhibit a wide diversity ranging from high altitude, torrential cold water to warm water Carps. Besides, AJK is also endowed with warm and hot climatic condition (5/6 months in northern districts where atmospheric temperature ranges even 40 - 42° C and 8/9 months in southern districts in a year) which offers good scope to develop sport fishery with high valued sportive fishes as well as commercial fish culture/aquaculture with wide varieties of Carps. To explore and to avail the potentiality of the state, in support of GOAJK's plan, FAO is executing the on- going project with UNDP financial assistance.
In last seven and half months (during the tenure of Aquaculturist - Consultant), the project activities were implemented and has succeeded in attaining various achievements.
At the beginning of the project, the support and assistance rendered by the project could not be of much help in establishment of the two Fish Seed Production and Distribution Centres at Mirpur and Chikar due to the lengthy land acquisition procedure and lack of technical hand at TWAF to design the Centre. Thus, the activity remained behind the schedule. To-date, the project has made considerable progress in establishment of the Centre at Chikar as the Centre's design and layout of the ponds have been completed by the support of the project and the construction work is awaited. In case of hatchery construction, the structures spawning tank, incubation tanks and cement tanks have been erected and needs a final touch for completion while at Mirpur the land acquisition is in final stage. On these issues, the project has drawn the attention of the concerned GOAJK authorities. The authorities have expressed their concern on these issues and have assured for their best support in expediting the work in future.
At the initial stage even, the project has made a good progress with encouraging results on adoption of polyculture technology in the farmers ponds. With the results, the farmers have been encouraged to adopt it further. It is further aimed to expand this technology in integration with different disciplines of agriculture and animal husbandry at the later stage of the project, by thus the farm outputs is increased giving higher economic benefits to the farmers.
The project has also succeeded to greater extent in bringing public awareness by celebrating Farmer's Day as well as by disseminating the information on the adopted technology of fish culture amongst the interested farmers by various means and ways e.g. personal contact, conducting training to Extension staff as well as the farmers, rendering technical service as follow - up programme and through developed simple extension materials in local language as a result the farmer who are already involved in this field have shown good sign of production and many more new farmers have got interested in embarking into fish culture.
Within this period, the project activities were implemented to initiate and develop atmosphere and the achievements made at this stage are also considered as preliminary. Much more to be done to achieve the project target in time to come. Therefore, the concerned authorities should give due considerations to resolved the constraints of the project at the earliest possible time, so that the project targets are meet in time.
