Getting Started in Odisha: Validating Our Programme Ideas and Setting Up Base
- Surya Pali
- Jun 29
- 6 min read
Summary
This post shares what we learned during a recent field visit to Ganjam district in Odisha, where we are laying the groundwork for our first field presence in the state.
Over the course of the visit, we met fisheries officials, farmers, a local Farmer Producer Organisation (FPO), and research and academic institutions to understand the region's aquaculture and test our programme assumptions on the ground.
The short version: the visit gave us encouraging validation for two ideas we've been developing—water quality monitoring and community pond clean-ups—and a much clearer picture of what building a presence here will actually require. We also came away struck by how little support farmers here currently receive: many told us they have almost no access to water quality testing or technical advice of any kind.
Why Ganjam, and Why Now
We didn't arrive at Ganjam by accident, but we also didn't arrive with our minds made up. Our early thinking, based on desk research, had pointed us towards Cuttack, which is closer to the research institutions around Bhubaneswar. The visits changed that calculation substantially.
A few things, taken together, made Ganjam the strongest candidate for our first advisory centre. It has a concentration of freshwater aquaculture, spread across a mix of private and community ponds. It's well-connected, with block-level market towns where farmers naturally gather. And it's within reach of the College of Fisheries at Rangeilunda and the wider institutional ecosystem in the state, which matters for the kind of long-term collaboration we hope to build.
But the most compelling reason was simpler, and it only became clear once we were on the ground: this is a region where the need is large, and almost nobody is meeting it.
So the goal of the visit was fairly practical. We wanted to answer a few questions:
Is there enough aquaculture activity here, and enough farmer demand, for our work to be worthwhile?
Do our programme ideas—particularly water quality monitoring and community pond clean-ups—actually meet the needs of the farmer?
What would it take to set up a field presence and start working here?
A trip like this is rarely tidy. You plan a day around three meetings, some end up getting cancelled, and sometimes the most useful insights are from the accidental meets. By the end, the picture was much clearer than the one we started with.
What the Fisheries Officials Told Us
A good part of the visit was spent meeting government fisheries officials at the district and block levels. These conversations matter to us for two reasons: officials know the region's farmers better than almost anyone, and any formal collaboration down the line would run through them.
A consistent theme did emerge. Officials repeatedly pointed to water quality monitoring as the clearest gap we could help fill. The reasoning was pretty straightforward: for many farmers here, fish isn't the primary livelihood, so they tend not to be proactive about pond health unless a problem becomes obvious. As one District Fisheries Officer put it, the labs exist—it's just that farmers don't use them. The opportunity, then, isn't to build more infrastructure; it's to bring testing closer to farmers and out into the field.
One more insight reshaped how we think about our programme. Officials noted that a large share of the ponds in the area are community-managed rather than privately owned. This was important information for us because on a pond used by many people, no single farmer can simply decide to change how it's managed. This is why community pond clean-up sits so naturally alongside water quality work. Several of the ponds we later saw, in poor and neglected condition, only reinforced the point.
Listening to Farmers
The conversations we valued most were with farmers themselves. And the need we heard, more than any other, was about water quality.
Access to testing has, in effect, dried up. Farmers told us the local labs and testing services they once relied on have largely shut down or are not accessible, leaving them with no easy way to know what's happening in their water until something visibly goes wrong. When we asked one of the biggest fish farmers in this region what would help most, his answer was immediately water quality testing. Interestingly, when we asked how often he'd want it done, he wasn't sure, which tells us our role here isn't only to provide the service, but to help farmers understand how to use it.
Disease came up, too, though in a particular way. The serious, fast-moving outbreaks that can wipe out a whole pond appear to be relatively uncommon in this region—something officials attributed in part to the low-intensity way most farming is done here, with modest stocking densities. What farmers do contend with is the steadier, chronic burden of parasites like fish lice, which most manage themselves with routine treatment.
What was most evident was the appetite for help. As one farmer told us, if support actually showed up in his area, plenty of farmers would turn out for it, because so little reaches them now. We were also pleasantly surprised when a farmer holding a large community pond asked us, entirely unprompted, whether we could help clean it up. We told him we could, and his raising it himself was a small but genuine validation of an idea we'd been developing.
What the Community Ponds Themselves Told Us
You can learn a lot from standing at the edge of a pond. Several of those we visited told their own story before any farmer said a word—bright green water thick with algal bloom, surface scum and floating waste, heavy weed growth along the margins. Many of the community ponds were in a poor state: dirty, weed-choked, and clearly neglected. Water levels were low across the board, though that's expected in summer.
Seeing this firsthand did more to validate our two programme ideas than any amount of desk research could. This condition of the community ponds made a strong case for clean-ups. When officials and farmers independently point in the same direction, and the ponds themselves back it up, it becomes clear to us that this is something worth pursuing.
Laying the Groundwork
Beyond programme questions, a major aim of this trip was practical: finding a base of operations.
We spent time around Konisi, in Rangeilunda Block, which has a few things going for it. It's well-connected and only about 30 minutes from Brahmapur, it's close to the College of Fisheries at Rangeilunda, and it sits near a Farmer Producer Organisation (FPO) office where farmers already gather. We were generously helped here by the FPO's CEO, who knows the area well and pointed us towards a suitable office space close to the main road, near the bank and the local market—a spot farmers already pass through regularly. We've now identified and begun securing that space.
Building Relationships With Research and Government Institutions
We also used the visit to begin longer-term relationships that we hope will strengthen our work here.
At the College of Fisheries, Rangeilunda, we met with the faculty and explored how we might collaborate.
One avenue we think is worth keeping open here is interns: if we find we need extra hands for programme work down the line, this is a relationship we could draw on to bring on fisheries students, who would also gain some hands-on experience in the process. We also visited the Central Institute of Freshwater Aquaculture (CIFA) in Bhubaneswar, where there's potential to collaborate on farmer training, and met with the Directorate of Fisheries in Cuttack to begin the conversation about formal collaboration.
These institutional relationships move slowly, and rightly so. Government bodies want to understand who an organisation is and what it's doing before they commit, and we think that scrutiny is healthy. The clear next step is to put together thorough documentation of who we are and what we plan to do, and to share it so the process can move forward. We left these conversations feeling cautiously optimistic. As the Director of Fisheries noted, there's no denying the region needs more people providing extension services to farmers.
Left: The Directorate of Fisheries, Odisha, Cuttack.
Right: Aquaculture-related materials at the Central Institute of Freshwater Aquaculture, Bhubaneswar
What's Next
This was largely a programme validation visit. It accomplished what we hoped it would. We came away with:
Encouraging, independent validation for both a water quality monitoring programme and a community pond clean-up programme in this region
A clearer understanding of the local fishery
The beginnings of an office and field presence in the Ganjam district
Early relationships with the fisheries department, a local FPO, and research and academic institutions
There's a good deal of work ahead before this becomes a running programme. We'll need to finalise our setup, formalise the partnerships we've started, and design our interventions around what we actually heard from farmers rather than what we assumed going in. But that's exactly the point of a trip like this: to replace assumptions with observations.
We'll keep you posted as the work in Ganjam takes shape. Thanks for reading!
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