The speaker outlines India's rapid rise as a major seafood exporter, noting that in 2018 the country shipped 1.3 million tonnes of seafood, earning $7 billion and targeting $10 billion in export revenue by 2022, with 70 % of that value coming from aquaculture. The introduction of Vannamei shrimp transformed the sector, yet Indian shrimp farms still rely on age‑old practices and minimal technology, a stark contrast to the high‑tech salmon farms the speaker observed in Norway. To explain this lag, the talk attributes it to India’s “ABC” mentality—astrology, Bollywood, and cricket—along with extreme cultural and linguistic diversity and a strong preference for face‑to‑face, low‑volume transactions. Lessons from retail (small‑sachet shampoo) and telecom (prepaid, content‑packaged services) illustrate how products can be tailored to Indian buying habits. The speaker proposes applying these insights to aquaculture: using shared‑economy models that run on farmers’ existing mobile phones, fostering peer‑to‑peer learning and word‑of‑mouth diffusion, and adopting a freemium pricing structure where basic tools are free and advanced features are paid, monetized via data intelligence. The overarching message is that technology exists; the challenge is innovative, culturally‑aware marketing to achieve sustainable adoption in Indian aquaculture.
Chapters
In 2018, India exported 1.3 million tons of seafood, and it earned $7 billion worth of foreign exchange. It became one of the top exporters in the world, and we set up an ambitious target for about like $10 billion, reaching $10 billion in 2022. 70% of export revenues come from aquaculture. Indian aquaculture has evolved from a traditional backyard to a commercial practice in the past 3 decades. Introduction of Vannamei has been a game changer in this industry. Established hatcheries feed mills and advisory services ecosystem has enabled shrimp farming as one of the most preferred aquaculture activities in the coastal states of India. We are talking about a billion-dollar aquaculture industry outlook. Even though the billion dollars is there, the farmers are still following the age-old practices for the farming activities. So lack of technology adoption has really, really impacted the efficiency of the farms here in India. I was there in Norway for 3 months. I was like— to understand the salmon market. I have seen laser guns and cage eyes and modern cage technologies, but when it comes to Indian farms, we only see the auto feeders. That's the, you know, maximum innovation that you have seen here. To understand this, why technology adoption is very slow in India, we need to understand Indian ABC mentality. It's astrology, Bollywood, and cricket, right? So these are the 3 things that define success in any business in India, the sensibilities of that. So to understand more about India, India speaks 22 languages and every 200 kilometers that you travel, you will see people eating different food and talking different language and having a completely different culture. So it is the customization that makes a lot of difference when you're launching services, technology services in India. Even though we have smartphone, unlimited internet connection, and Google Maps, we would still stop by asking someone the direction, right? So we love face-to-face value. You know, interaction as well as the crowd knowledge. So this is something we need to take into consideration. This is what retail industry in India has taken into consideration. So when shampoo was launched in India, it wasn't really taking off. They launched something which was available in supermarket and they just implanted into the Indian market. It was big, it can last long for one month of consumption. But it really didn't take off, right? So they had to, you know, they had to do research on what went wrong. So this is a typical grocery shop in India wherein people do not buy and stack it up for like one month. They buy it in smaller quantity, and this is something that has intrigued the retailers, and they came up with this solution. Like, they made just small sachet of shampoo which lasted just one use, which is really bad for environment, by the way. But in terms of business strategy, they have really nailed that and they were able to up their revenues tremendously. And one industry that has learned from retail industry success was telecom industry. A decade ago, we had just a fraction of users using mobile phone, but now it is like 100+ percentage of tele-density. That essentially means that one person is having one or 2 connections roughly. So what they have learned from retailers was prepaid connection, it is as low as 15 cents, you would be on and you would be part of the World Wide Web. So that is something that has really, really inspired. And the way they have monetized was really interesting. This is something that the aquaculture industry has learned from them. So they haven't sold the internet as internet. They sold the internet as song. They sold the internet as video. So this has been like packaged in a way that like people can easily adopt. And this is how the aquaculture technologies have to be sold to the companies. On the advent of mobile internet, it again learned from the further industries and it has created shared economy wherein like one car can be shared among 50 different users and one house can be let out for various people. So this is something, this shared economy can be like really, really beneficial for us to learn to implement agriculture technology solution. Largely when people launch services in India, they may go for proprietary gadgets wherein, like, the learnings from operators or mobile service providers is such that we should be able to use what is existing on the ground already. If the farmer is having a mobile handset, just try use that mobile handset. You don't need sophisticated camera and other solution. So what we have built was something very similar. We built on shared economy model. And again, don't forget that like we believe a lot of word-of-mouth, you know, marketing strategies here in India. So it's important that you need to be able to create opportunities to learn it from the peers. So peer-to-peer learning would really help us propagate our ideas. Finally, the freemium is a big driver on technology adoption in many domains. We should be offering the basic product for free and you can add up, like, the advanced products can be, you know, asked for a fee. And here, the Googles and Facebooks of the world are using this model. While they are offering their services for free, they are making revenues through the data intelligence that the users are providing it to them. Finally, there are Technology is available. It is just that we need to be finding innovative ways of marketing to the people so that, like, it can improve the sustainability of this industry. Thank you. Rajamanohar,
