Price of Hilsa is shooting skyward this year too. A kg of the most sought after and not so abundantly found fish variety is being sold at Rs 2,500 here.
Skyrocketing price of Hilsa during monsoon, when the fish catch from the Bay of Bengal usually remains high, has kept the buyers at bay.
According to reports, Hilsa, a delicacy, weighing between 500 and 700 gm was available for anything between Rs 1,000 and Rs 1,200 in the retail market. The fish weighing more than a kg was sold between Rs 2,000 and Rs 2,500.
Apart from the low catch, locals said, price of Hilsa was bound to increase as a large amount of the fish was being smuggled to West Bengal and Bangladesh.
A banker Santosh Mohanty said this year he could not afford to taste Hilsa because the price is at all time high.
The season between mid-June and mid-October is considered the peak time for good fishing in the Bay of Bengal, but for the last five years the catch has been just around 20 to 30 per cent in comparison to preceding years.
Besides, by the time the fishes land here, traders auction them and supply to neighbouring states leaving little scope for locals to buy Hilsa.
In mid-90s, Balasore was exporting nearly 50 MTs of Hilsa everyday, but this year the quantity is below 20 per cent.
Roughly 30 to 40 per cent of the catch is earmarked for domestic consumption and the rest is supplied to Cuttack, Bhubaneswar, Rourkela, Khurda, Sambalpur and places like Kolkata, Chennai, New Delhi.
“Earlier we used to export at least 25 tonnes of Hilsa daily from the Balaramgadi fishing base alone, but now the quantity has reduced to two to three tonnes. A boat which was coming with at least one quintal of fish, now fetches only 20 kg to 30 kg,” said Narendra Behari Das, president of trawler owners’ association.
Fishermen fear the catch would get further reduced this year due to the change of wind pattern.
While around 4,000 fishing boats including 500 trawlers are engaged in fishing in the district, most of the boats do not venture into the deep sea fearing huge loss.
