It suggests that globally, and with only a few exceptions, rural women fare worse than rural men and urban women and men. Rural women spend more time than urban women and men in reproductive and household work, including time spent obtaining water and fuel, caring for children and the sick, and processing food. This is because of poor rural infrastructure and services as well as culturally assigned roles that severely limit women’s participation in employment opportunities. Faced with a lack of services and infrastructure, rural women carry a great part of the burden of providing water and fuel for their households. Rural women tend to underreport their employment as contributing family members, according to available data female employment in agriculture is consistently lower than it is for men across the total adult population in developing countries. The jobs of rural women who are employed tend to be shorter term, more precarious and less protected than those of rural men and urban people. The lack of flexible hours to accommodate family work combined with wage and job discrimination and limited representation of women in workers’ organizations are partly responsible for this.

India is the second-largest fish producing nation in the world. Fish farming is an emerging sector with high potentiality of employment generation. Consumption of fish is growing compare to high growth of population. Sea and river are the main source of fish which is decreasing day by day because of regular catching of fish from all these source. Hence, starting fish farming business is a time demand initiative of rural people to meet nutritional demand of Indian people. Increasing demand of fish has already attracted people from other sector. In this situation, Ananda is trying to build a ecosystem with rural women in fish farming so that they can get appropriate livelihood program. We also promoting them to prepare some byproducts of fish and subsidiary activities like, dry fish business, fish marking, fish restaurants, production of fish feed etc.

In India, this sector engages over 14.50 million people as primary producers and millions more along the value chain. Transformation of the fisheries sector from traditional to commercial scale has led to an increase in fish production from 0.75 Million Metric tonnes in 1950-51 to 12.61 Million Metric tonnes during 2017-18 with a contribution of 8.92 MMT from the inland sector and 3.69 MMT from the marine sector.

The priority for small-scale fisheries must be to secure and improve the benefits they provide by increasing their resilience to ecological, social and economic change. Challenges about the livelihoods of the fishing community, the sustainability of inland fisheries and sustainability of the aquatic resources on which they depend also need to be built up.

Now, with updated technologies, rural women can do fish farming in the small space by way of aquaphonics, RAS, Biofloc etc. Banks are providing fisheries finance for setting up such project in profitable way. NABARD is also funding projects for rural development and agriculture. NABARD is also providing financial support and loan for fish farming.