Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal on Monday directed the fisheries department to prepare an assessment report of the quantity of fish required in the state to gain a clear picture about the potential of the market. Sonowal said the Act East policy of Prime Minister Narendra Modi has opened a window of opportunity for the state’s fish producers to gain access to the South-East Asian market and they must be prepared to compete with the best in the world. The chief minister distributed appointment letters to 32 junior engineers of fisheries department here. Sonowal asked the new appointees to spend a night with the fishermen and the fish producers to understand their difficulties and challenges. “The fishery sector has immense potential and we must vigorously engage in it for deriving maximum benefits. Assam is blessed with abundant water resources and we have the capacity to become biggest producer and exporter of fish in the country. But for that, we must adopt latest scientific technologies for augmenting our production,” Sonowal said. Appreciating the fisheries department for being able to increase the state’s fish production by 20,000MT in 2017-18 over the previous year, Sonowal said the Chief Minister’s Samagra Grammya Unnayan Yojna, a scheme to transform the rural economy with a budget outlay of Rs 33,000 crore, has also kept fishery as a priority area. “The infinite potential of the Brahmaputra and the Barak must be harnessed to achieve fast-paced development and vast presence of natural waterbodies must be properly utilised to grow the fishery sector,” he said. Saying that commercial fishermen go through a lot of hardships to catch fish, which one cannot realise without witnessing their painstaking processes, Sonowal announced that best fishermen and fish producers would be felicitated at a state-level programme to acknowledge their contribution to the state. Highlighting the programme of distributing soil health cards to farmers as an important step by the Centre to give the farmers knowledge of the quality of their farming lands, Sonowal said the cards have been distributed to 11 lakh farmers of the state. The distribution of water health cards is also being planned, he added. Fisheries minister Parimal Suklabaidya said Nabard has approved a package of Rs 100 crore for 1,000 hectares of fisheries of individual owners. He said efforts of the department’s officials had resulted in the 3.27 lakh MT production of fish in the state in 2017-18, an increase of 20,000MT over the previous year.