Prawns: A Gambling Game

This academic year, SWAD, the food club I coordinate in Christ University, has launched a new initiative, called the SWAD Forum. SWAD Forum organises a series of lectures and panel discussions featuring well-established professionals from across the food system in India.

The aim of this initiative is to create a flow of knowledge and ideas between the present generation and the future generation of food professionals, and to build a strong network between them. Themes vary with each month and each speaker, but always connect to the core concepts of SWAD – the local, traditional and ethical production and consumption of food in India.

Yesterday SWAD Forum hosted it’s third guest lecture for the semester. The speaker was Mr. Kedarnath Reddy. Mr. Reddy has been in the business of aqua culture and prawn cultivation in the Nellore region of Andhra Pradesh since 1993. Since then he has begun business to trade in seafood directly with the consumers, through an e-commerce platform. He has also started Prawn Crunch, a chain of outlets selling value-added prawn products like crumbed and batter-fried prawn snacks, across Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad.

Introducing the Speaker

In the guest lecture Mr. Reddy shared many ideas and stories, starting with how he entered this industry, to the processes and challenges in prawn cultivation, and some of his experiences over the past two decades.

Nellore, on the coastal belt of Andhra Pradesh is the country’s biggest prawn cultivating region, supplying to Bangalore, Chennai, and even as far as Mumbai! A few decades ago, Nellore was the rice bowl of Andhra, dominated by paddy cultivation. Today, most farmers have converted to the more lucrative farming of prawns.

Mr. Reddy sharing his knowledge and experiences

From the talk we learnt that prawns are a very delicate creature to cultivate. The process begins with a Mother Prawn, called a “brooder”. She lays lakhs of prawn hatchlings each day. She is like the Queen Bee, the only one who can lay hatchlings that will mature into healthy adult prawns. This means you cannot have “heirloom prawns” in the way you can have “heirloom seeds”. Each extremely valuable brooder weighs 2-3 kgs and costs anywhere from 50 to 70 lakhs! And every 6 months, when the brooder reaches the end of her lifespan, prawn farmers must invest in new mother prawns, which are carefully searched for and caught from the sea by experts.

The hatchlings laid by the brooder are known as seeds. The seeds, about 100 per pond, are reared in a mix of freshwater and saline water. They are fed pellets of rice or fish, and their environment is highly regulated. Even a slight lack of oxygen or a change in salinity of water could kill the entire pond, leading to severe losses. To ensure these expensive shellfish stay healthy throughout their breeding period, the farms are visited daily by Taiwanese shrimp doctors, who check their water, their feed and even analyse their excreta from the gastric vein. It is of utmost important to ensure that all your shrimp are healthy; else the whole batch will get sick and die!

The industry is a very labour intensive one. Apart from the regulation of the ponds, people are employed in three shifts to watch over the farms 24/7. Prawns are an extremely expensive “crop” so to speak. If a thief sneaks in and steals a few net full of prawns, he could walk away with fifty- to sixty thousand rupees worth of produce! Every aspect of the process must be highly monitored.  

In the worlds of Mr. Reddy– “Cultivating shrimp is like gabling. You bet on a horse, you may win or you may lose.” It is a game of high risk and high returns.

Thanking Mr. Reddy on the behalf of SWAD with a token of appreciation

Did you know, 90% of prawns in India’s market are cultivated in farms like Mr. Reddy’s? If not for aqua culture, there would never be enough prawns to meet the country’s demand!