In Alekhargul, a village barely five kilometres from Badarpur town in Assam’s Sribhumi district, the monsoon arrived every year with the same uncertainty.

The rivers that fed the region’s paddy fields would swell past their banks. Within days, fields that families depended on for rice would disappear under murky brown water for months.

Homes were swept away. Livestock drowned. Farmers watched their only source of income disappear, year after year, with seemingly no way to stop it — or make use of it.

Nazrul Haque grew up in the middle of this cycle.

“My father farmed the same land that drowned every year, and the arithmetic of it never worked. Ordinary paddy farming was the only occupation most families in the area knew, and it consistently failed to yield enough to live on. There was no fallback trade, no second income to lean on when the water came. We were farming to survive one season, and then losing everything to the next,” he recalls.

His father had tried, in his own way, to work with the water rather than fight it. Long before Nazrul took up fish farming, his father borrowed Rs 10,000 to start a small fish venture. He used the money carefully and repaid the bank on schedule.

The venture never grew into much. But it planted an idea in the family — and gave them a repayment record the bank would remember.

Choosing water over a government job

In 2000, fresh out of graduation, Nazrul turned down what was then considered a safe career option for a young man in rural Assam: a government job.

Instead, he chose fish farming.

His reasoning was simple. If his land was going to remain underwater for months anyway, why not make that water earn something rather than simply endure it?

Sribhumi already had a ready market for fish nearby. That, more than any grand plan, helped decide the direction he took.

“I began small, on a modest plot, with modest results. My first attempts produced barely five to seven quintals of fish from a single hectare. It was not much, but it proved the idea could work. That was enough for me to keep going,” he says.

Nazrul continued reinvesting in his farm. In 2003, he approached the State Bank of India’s Badarpur branch and secured a loan under a state government scheme called ARIASP. The capital allowed him to expand beyond a single plot and adopt more scientific methods of fish rearing.

Farming the water, not just fishing it

To understand why Nazrul’s results began to differ from those of his neighbours, it helps to look at how fish were traditionally obtained in flood-prone parts of Assam.

For generations, the common approach in submerged areas like Sribhumi was to capture rather than farm fish. During the monsoon, wild fish would enter flooded fields on their own. Villagers would then net or trap them as the water began to recede, typically between June and December.

The practice was seasonal and unpredictable, and the yields were low — only a few kilograms per hectare each year.

Nazrul took a different approach.

Instead of waiting for the floods to bring fish, he deliberately stocked his ponds........

© The Better India