India landed 35.7 lakh tonnes of marine fish in 2025 and produced about 198 lakh tonnes of fish in all in 2024-25. A large share never reaches a plate in good condition. A parliamentary committee put the value of fish lost after harvest at about Rs 61,000 crore a year, and ICAR-CIFT, the government’s fish-technology institute in Kochi, says processing alone leaves 4 to 6 million tonnes of heads, guts, frames, skin and scales. Much of the rest of the low-value catch goes, cheaply, to fishmeal plants.

That waste and that cheap catch can become products that keep for months or years: fish oil, refined into omega-3 capsules; fish amino acid fertiliser for natural farming; fishmeal; and properly cured, dried or frozen fish. This piece looks at what each is worth, how long it lasts, who captures the value, and what would move more of it to the people who catch the fish. It follows this blog’s pieces on India’s animal-protein exports and the fisheries scheme that has barely paid out, and takes the same approach as the piece on the whey that cheese makers pour away.

How much is lost, and where

The estimates differ widely, which is itself part of the problem. The Rs 61,000 crore figure, repeated in a Lok Sabha reply, splits into Rs 46,000 crore inland and Rs 15,000 crore marine. A 2022 evaluation by NABARD’s consultancy arm put physical wastage at 10.52% of marine fish and 5.23% of inland fish. On processing waste, ICAR-CIFT’s recent press material says 4–6 million tonnes a year, while its own by-products database gives about 0.3 million tonnes of seafood waste; the first counts all trimmings, the second only what is collected. Filleting can leave as much as three-quarters of a fish as waste, and skin and bone alone are about 30%.

Losses start on the boat. ICAR-CIFT’s study of 14 species found that fish iced immediately keep for 5 to 16 days, oil sardine about 6, but scads and anchovies left in the sun for three hours before icing keep for less than one to two days. Ice and insulated boxes at the point of landing are worth more than most processing.

Fish oil: exported crude, bought back refined

India exported Rs 354 crore of fish body oil in 2024-25, much of it probably crude oil from the fishmeal plants of the west coast, and imported Rs 204 crore of fish lipid oil, fish body oil and cod liver oil. Omega-3 capsules themselves cannot be separated in the trade data, because they are classed with food preparations or medicines rather than under fish oil. But the pattern is visible: the country sells the bulk raw material and buys some of the refined material back.

The gap between crude oil and capsules is large. Peruvian crude fish oil, the world benchmark, sold for about $2,600 a tonne in early 2025 and about $6,800 in June 2026, when world fish-oil output was running about a fifth below a year earlier, or about Rs 247–646 a kg. A 60-capsule pack of 1,000 mg fish-oil capsules with 180 mg EPA and 120 mg DHA retails for about Rs 450–800 on Indian pharmacy sites, which is Rs 7,550–13,320 for the kilogram of oil inside. That retail price pays for refining (deodorising, molecular distillation to remove contaminants), gelatin capsules, testing, packing, GST, marketing and the retailer’s margin, so it is not profit. It does show where most of the money in the chain sits.

Refined fish oil sold as a supplement is regulated under FSSAI’s Health Supplements and Nutraceuticals Regulations, 2022, in force since April 2022, and fish oil itself now has a quality standard modelled on the Codex standard for fish oils. A small plant has to meet those standards, which means oxidation and contaminant testing it cannot do alone. This piece makes no claim about the health effects of omega-3 supplements.

What a tonne of fish is worth at each step

Illustrative arithmetic, not a plant’s accounts. Yields are about 22% meal and 7% oil, from a study of sardine by-products and a Peruvian fishmeal plant’s reported yields; Indian oil sardine is fattier in some seasons. The 70% capsule-grade share is this blog’s assumption, and capsule prices are retail, before the costs listed above.

A fishmeal plant turns a tonne of oily fish into roughly Rs 26,530–68,320 of meal and oil. The fishers who supplied it are paid the price of low-grade fish. Studies by the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) put fishers’ share of what consumers pay for fresh fish at about 30–68% depending on the species, and at about 64% in 2013-14. For fish that goes to fishmeal, they get only the raw-material price, and none of the value added afterwards.

Fishmeal plants and juvenile fish

A study by the Central Institute of Brackishwater Aquaculture counted 35 fishmeal plants, 23 of them in Karnataka, and estimated about 65,000 tonnes of fishmeal and 34,000 tonnes of fish oil a year from Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu; there are no official national figures. Mukka Proteins, the largest listed producer, reports capacity of 115,050 tonnes of meal and 16,950 tonnes of oil a year across plants in Karnataka, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Oman. Oil sardine is the main raw material; Kerala alone landed 1.49 lakh tonnes of it in 2024.

The conflict is with food and with the fishery itself. Fishmeal plants pay for volume, not size, so they create a market for juvenile fish that would be worth more if left to grow. Kerala set minimum legal sizes for 14 species in 2015 and 44 more in 2017, after reports that juveniles were being sold to plants in Mangaluru and Thoothukudi. A CMFRI study estimated that catching juvenile threadfin bream alone cost Kerala’s fisheries about Rs 221 crore. The plants also have local costs: the National Green Tribunal fined a fishmeal plant near Udyavara in Udupi district in July 2022 for pollution affecting nearby villages. Processing waste, not whole fish, is the better raw material for meal and oil.

Fish amino acid: a fertiliser from waste

Fish amino acid, a liquid fertiliser used in natural farming, is made by fermenting fish waste with jaggery for two to three weeks. One natural-farming guide uses about 200 grams of jaggery for each kilogram of fish waste; a research protocol uses equal weights. Farmers dilute it heavily, typically 2–5 ml a litre of water for a foliar spray. An ICAR study found jaggery-fermented carp waste stayed usable for about 60 days, and that more than 20% jaggery made it spoil faster. A natural-farming account puts the production cost at about Rs 30 a litre and the farm-gate selling price at about Rs 50; branded products sell for much more, but no reliable retail benchmark was found.

The appeal for fishing villages is that it needs no plant: drums, jaggery and the guts and heads already at the landing centre. Fish protein hydrolysates and fish emulsions, the industrial versions, need enzymes and drying and are mostly made by larger firms.

Curing and cold storage: making fish last

Traditional curing is where most fishing households, and particularly women, already add value. Salting and sun-drying on open beaches, however, give a product that keeps for weeks rather than months and fails food-safety tests. Hygienic drying on racks or in solar dryers, smoking kilns and proper packing extend storage life to several months, as the Odisha and Mangaluru studies show, and fetch higher prices; WorldFish and CMFRI projects in Odisha have trained women’s groups to make hygienic dried fish and fish pickles, papads and cutlets.

The government’s main fisheries scheme, Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY), approved in 2020 at Rs 20,050 crore and extended into 2025-26 with about Rs 700 crore more, has approved about Rs 2,797 crore for cold-chain and marketing infrastructure: 775 cold storages and ice plants, 28,489 fish transport units, kiosks and markets. It has also approved Rs 3,742 crore for 28 fishing harbours and 25 landing centres in five years, and has Rs 2,500 crore in the 2026-27 budget. By-product processing at landing centres is not a separate line in what has been reported.

Who could capture the value

Kerala’s fishermen’s cooperative federation, Matsyafed, shows that collective processing is possible. It federates more than 650 primary societies, 118 of them women’s cooperatives, and runs ice and freezing plants, two fish manure plants and a plant that makes chitosan from shellfish waste. Those are the right kinds of assets: they turn what would be dumped into something that keeps and sells. The step most cooperatives have not taken is fish oil, because a refinery that meets FSSAI and export standards costs far more than a manure plant.

A practical split would be for cooperatives and women’s groups to own the first, low-cost stage at the landing centre (collecting and chilling waste, making fish amino acid and silage, hygienic drying) and to sell crude oil and graded waste under contract to licensed refiners and fishmeal plants, rather than selling juvenile fish to them.

What would fix this

• The Department of Fisheries should publish annual statistics on fishmeal and fish-oil production, plant by plant, with the share of raw material that is processing waste rather than whole fish.
• PMMSY should fund waste-collection, chilling and by-product units at landing centres as a named component, owned by fishermen’s cooperatives or women’s groups, and report them separately.
• Coastal states should require fishmeal plants to record the species and size of the fish they buy, so that minimum-legal-size rules can be enforced at the plant gate, not only at sea.
• ICAR-CIFT and FSSAI should publish a simple standard and testing route for small producers of fish amino acid and crude fish oil, so that cooperative products can be sold to refiners and farmers with known quality.

These are proposals from this blog, not recommendations any agency has adopted.

What this piece could not establish

There are no official national figures for fishmeal and fish-oil production or for the domestic omega-3 capsule market, and capsule imports cannot be separated in the trade data. The fishmeal plant count and output come from a single older study covering a few states. Indian fishmeal and sardine landing prices were found only as sellers’ asking prices, so the value chain uses world fish-oil prices and is illustrative. Sources disagree on the 2025 oil sardine catch (1.68 or 2.53 lakh tonnes) and on the volume of fish waste (0.3 or 4–6 million tonnes). The shelf-life figures come from separate studies of different species and products, some decades old. No current figures were found for Matsyafed’s by-product output or for incomes of women’s dry-fish groups.

Sources and caveats

About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.