Farmer participatory fish disease surveillance and monitoring: Use of PRA tools

Abstract

At C.I.F.A. Kausalyaganga, Bhubaneswar, Orissa, Participatory Rapid Appraisal (PRA) approach and methods have been tried as part of the Institution-Village Linkage Programme (IVLP) to help the aquaculture farmers to do their own analysis on fish disease epidemiology, surveillance and monitoring, and make their own needs and priorities known to scientists. It was revealed that PRA satisfies the acute decision making needs of fish disease epidemiology, surveillance and monitoring. Participatory methods of "visualization", such as mapping, modelling, scoring matrices, linkages and causal diagramming are powerful, popular, valid and reliable when well facilitated and performed. PRA is a low cost diagnostic method, which can be very well applied to fish health surveillance and monitoring.