InSeason Fish, Divya’s seafood initiative, works with fishing and seafood eating communities to create more sustainable marine fisheries.

She is the first Indian woman to win the Future for Nature award for her contribution to nature conservation, and has also won the Condé Nast Traveller award for Excellence in Culinary Conservation.

We spoke with Divya about her professional journey, future plans and more.

Can you tell us a bit about InSeason Fish, the initiative you’ve co-founded? What is its goal and how do you pursue it?

InSeason Fish is a sustainable seafood initiative that works along both the east and west coasts of India. We work with all stakeholders in the fisheries – from fisherwo/men to traders, restaurants, and everyday seafood eaters. The goal of InSeason Fish is to create a supportive environment and economy for sustainable fishing practices in India. To this end, we have identified indigenous practices of sustainability used by fishing communities in India. 

We have compared this to global best practices and found that many of our indigenous practices meet these global standards (more here and here). We have then identified the main challenges and barriers to more fishing communities following these best practices, which largely seems to be because of a very selective market. Our research showed that the main seafood markets are the metros, where people eat a very limited selection of seafood varieties. But sustainable fisheries catch hundreds of seafood varieties, which is as it should be in a diverse tropical ocean. 

So we decided to help seafood eaters by creating a seafood calendar that can provide a guide on how to:

1) Eat Diverse Seafood, and

2) Eat Seasonally (to avoid putting pressure on a fish during its breeding season)

We also suggest this rule for people living in coastal areas:

3) Buy from small-scale sustainable fishermen

On a fishploration

We help coastal seafood eaters follow the third and most important sustainability practice through our guided tours (Fishplorations) of fish markets and fishing harbours. We have tied up with restaurants for one-off events, like the Pulicat Seafood Festival as well as longer associations where we provide consulting services to help them streamline their seafood supplies.

What have been some of the key insights you’ve gleaned over the course of your work in conservation?

When I began working in the field of conservation, I imagined that the only way one could achieve conservation was by working in remote, wild places. However, I now realise that wildlife conservation is an everyday event. One act of choosing to reuse a shopping bag, eat meals at home rather than ordering a delivery etc. makes the difference between waste reaching a landfill or a plastic bag getting stuck inside a sea turtle. All of this is conservation, and therefore every one of us can be a conservationist. Wildlife conservation needs to be spoken about more in cities than in remote, wild places.

The nature of development in urban areas  seems to necessitate the destruction of wild areas, far away. For example, every bag of cement going into constructing a house in a city, like Mumbai or Delhi, has been mined in a wild river, far away. And every kg of sand that is lost from that river means that much less sand is carried downstream for a sea turtle to nest on a beach. Therefore, what matters to conservation is the things that we choose to do and the things we choose not to do.

Could you share some of the rewarding and challenging moments of your professional journey?

Working with the general public, and specifically children has been extremely rewarding. During the pandemic, for instance, we put out a call for artists to voluntarily contribute artwork on India’s marine life so that we could provide something for children to do, while schools were shut down. India’s artists responded with so much kindness and enthusiasm that we were able to put together an educational colouring book for children in coastal Tamil Nadu.

Speaking with a trader

The pandemic was also a wake-up call regarding how much debt fishing communities face and how much support they need. Examining issues like poverty and debt is a little outside my wheel-house as a conservationist, but I realised that I needed to figure out how to make my conservation solutions also work for these livelihood aspects of communities.

What is it like to teach the next generation of change-makers at Ashoka University?

Teaching students is highly rewarding particularly when I am able to make them rethink their long-standing assumptions of how the world (particularly the natural world) works. Ashoka University offers the opportunity for both the students and myself to think outside the box, and therefore I teach courses about nature and conservation that are aimed at economics or international relations students, for instance. All of these cross-cutting and interdisciplinary courses are very exciting as they have lead to a new generation of economics students taking up cutting-edge fields such as nature-based solutions or biodiversity finance.

What plans for the future? What would you like to work towards?

Through my research group and the team at InSeason Fish, we have laid the groundwork for some conservation interventions. For instance, we created the Sharks of India tool for nature education and also helped to get areas on the west coast and east coast of India recognized as internationally important areas for sharks and rays. We will now be following up on this to ensure that some grassroots conservation initiatives are put in place at these and other locations. We also want to see the impact of InSeason Fish scale-up nationwide.