The Union Budget 24-25 brought a lot of good cheer to the shrimp industry in the form of increasing the overall budget, a plan to establish breeding centers, farming, and processing centers, and reducing custom duties. However, India needs to expand its marine export basket and consider other export-worthy fish to de-risk the sector. The overall marine sector's economic outlaw is myopic, focusing on a single segment and neglecting India's diverse marine ecology that includes a variety of fishes, seaweed, and other marine agri products. We need the extension of the rural development budget to building ports, harbors and fish landing centers, upgrading the ITI's to include training for a variety of marine skills, co-location of fishing villages with commercial hubs, extending the climate taxonomy to cover the blue economy, and developing an overall pan-India marine spatial plan for conservation and sustainable utilization of our vast marine resources: Ms Devleena Bhattacharjee, Chair, FICCI Working Group on Fishtech, Founder & CEO, Numer8, Founder & COO, ClimaCrew. #BudgetWithFICCI @FinMinIndia @nsitharaman @nsitharamanoffc @DDNewslive @DDNewsHindi @PIB_India @PIBHindi @airnewsalerts @AIRNewsHindi

I'm not surprised that this almost hit 8 hours. People *crave* depth. For every five-hour plus episode of mine, the overwhelming feedback is that it was too short, another 5 hours would be nice. The mainstream goes a mile wide & an inch deep, as @prempanicker says. So go deep!