Millions of people living along rivers of the Indian subcontinent depend on capture fisheries for their subsistence, incomes, livelihood and food security, access to affordable protein, and social dignity. Yet, riverine capture fisheries have generally been neglected both in policy-making and academic research. This is because riverine fisheries are small-scale, and their revenue contribution to the state is limited, and because land-based agriculture and aquaculture have marginalized capture fisheries. Riverine fisheries have been affected by numerous threats, due to which fish resources are declining. The major factors of decline have been large dams, barrages, and river pollution, which have severely impacted the quantity and quality of river flows that sustain capture fisheries.

River-floodplain fisheries in the Gangetic plains have witnessed protracted and intensive conflicts over fish resources, fishing rights, and access. These conflicts have severely affected fishers’ livelihoods and led to continued socio-economic marginalization of fishing communities. Across the region, increasing control of fisheries by criminal gangs, and resulting violence, have directly threatened fishers. Therefore, understanding fishery conflicts is important with the multiple, entwined normative concerns of rights, social justice, ecological sustainability, and economic equity. Fishery conflicts thus represent a multi-dimensional problem, for which we need an interdisciplinary analysis and approach.

However, the study of resource conflicts remains fragmented across disciplines. Ecological and economic explanations remain fixated on aspects of resource decline by overcapacity or overfishing, or on institutional constraints in managing rights and access in the fishery “commons”. Political ecology and a certain set of history studies hold power relations, social stratification by caste or class, or capitalistic relations of production, as central to continued conflicts. More recently, cultural studies have tended to focus on understanding differences in resource-use and harvesting practices, technological influences, or knowledge-systems, to explain cultural incompatibilities underlying fishery conflicts. All these explanations are partial, and therefore also problematic, when viewed in isolation. For instance, Malthusian and Neo-Malthusian narratives of “overfishing, scarcity, and conflict” do not acknowledge processes of adaptation or organization among fishing communities. They also seldom attempt to understand historic social disparities that shape narratives of overfishing, often by state or private interests, to exercise control or alienate fish producers. Institutional explanations remain narrowly centred on transaction costs, ill-defined property rights, and economic inefficiencies in governing open-access fisheries systems. But they often ignore cultural differences, socioeconomic inequalities, and the dynamic ecological settings in which conflicts unfold. Similarly, political and historic explanations deal only with social stratification and power relations, to the extent of ignoring or even denying that ecological or cultural variables can be equally important in generating and maintaining conflicts.