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Journalism of Courage
In the winter of 1900, the British introduced Kashmir to a new guest – the Scotland native brown trout. Fittingly, the new guest took to the place like fish to water – not only did it enrich its aquatic life but it also made it an angler’s paradise. Over a century later, Kashmir is all set to welcome back its old friend — the fisheries department plans to reintroduce the trout back into the Valley for game.
The fish will be reintroduced into cold-water streams in October. “This is a huge moment for us. We’re doing it for the first time since the British,” Abdul Majid Tak, director of Kashmir’s fisheries department, tells The Indian Express. “This project is going to revive it.”
A cold-water fish, the brown trout – like its cousin, the rainbow trout — prefers cool and well-oxygenated water. Usually growing to between 15 and 22 inches in length and between 1 and 5 pounds, the trout is considered a popular game fish. While the rainbow trout can grow robustly in fish farms or fish tanks, making them good for food production, the brown trout only thrives in the wild. Best suited to freshwaters, this fish spends much of its time in crevices between boulders in streams.
According to the government’s fisheries website, the British first introduced the brown trout in the Valley’s streams in 1900 thanks to the efforts of Frank J Mitchel, an Englishman who owned a private carpet factory in Kashmir.
This was the second attempt to introduce the fish into the Valley – the first was a year ago, when the then Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, Pratap Singh, received it as a return gift from the then Earl of Bradford.
While the first attempt – a consignment of 10,000 brown trout eggs that perished even before they reached the Valley – was a failure, the second was a resounding success. The shipment that came included 1,800 fries, or tiny trout, and was introduced into the Panzagam stream in Kashmir’s Dachigam.
Soon, the brown trout came to inhabit other streams, from the Lidder in South Kashmir’s Pahalgam and Bringhi in Kokernag, to Ferozpora in Tangmarg. As it increasingly became a game fish, Kashmir — through the fisheries department established under Frank J Mitchel’s watch in 1903 — designated 360 ‘beats’, or areas where exclusive fishing rights are sold or rented to anglers, for it.
Eventually, rampant and unregulated angling over the years caused the fish population to decline. Over the last year, however, the fisheries department has decided to embark on a mission to revive Kashmir’s brown trout population for game.
According to officials, it was the central Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY) and J&K’s Holistic Agricultural Development Programme – both aimed at promoting sustainable agricultural practices — that gave impetus to the project.
“The schemes allowed us to import germplasm from outside,” Shabir Ahmad Shabir, assistant fisheries director for Anantnag and Kulgam, says.
The germplasm — three lakh “pure” brown trout eggs — was imported from Denmark a year ago and hatched in Kulgam. For a government that has, for the last decade or so, focused mainly on trout farming for food, this was a significant milestone.
But at Kulgam’s government-operated Tchansar Hatchery, the department met their first challenge – how to sustain a fish that doesn’t accept artificial feed.
“We hit the books to learn everything we can about their feeding habits. Then we collected crustaceans from different parts of South Kashmir, dried them in the oven, ground them and mixed cod liver oil to make the feed,” Shabir, the assistant fisheries director who oversaw the project, says.
Then came the second hurdle: the fish would not come to the surface to feed.
“We studied their habits again and learnt that they feed in the dark. We then created such conditions in the hatchery by putting curtains around it. But we still couldn’t tell if they had fed and had to check their bellies just to be sure,” says Shabir.
With the fries now weighing 7-8 gram (0.01 pound), the department hopes that they can now introduce them into Kashmir’s cold-water streams by October, even in water bodies such as the Veshav river and the Kounsarnag lake in Kulgam, which did not previously have the fish.
The time too was carefully chosen: brown trout are generally cannibalistic — meaning that bigger individuals prey on the smaller ones — and officials worried that this could threaten their survival.
“The October/November is the breeding season for this fish,” Abdul Majid Tak, director of Kashmir’s fisheries department, says. “At this time, they are generally less aggressive and need very little food to eat. Since they are not cannibalistic in this period, we have chosen it to introduce the stock in the streams. By March, they become very aggressive.”
The plans have drawn enthusiasm from local anglers, with many hoping it would help push up tourism.
“When the British introduced the brown trout here, it made history,” Rauf Tramboo, president of the Travel Agents Association of Kashmir (TAAK) and an avid angler himself, says. “We’re again witnessing that today.”
Says Tak: “While the brown trout is delicious but it’s essentially a game fish,” says Director Tak. “Their aggressive nature makes the chase thrilling for anglers. This [introducing them into streams] is certainly going to give a boost to tourism”.
However, there could be challenges – such as the ecological disturbance posed by illegal riverbed mining.
“Unregulated riverbed mining in the Valley’s streams has disturbed the habitat of trout,” says Tramboo. “No project would be a success unless we preserve the habitat.”
