The ARA Is Expanding to a New Region

Current Regions of Operations

The Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture (ARA), FWI's primary program for improving the lives of farmed fishes, currently operates in two districts of Andhra Pradesh, India: Eluru¹ and Nellore. 

Currently, we support 44 active farms in Nellore and 98 farms in Eluru. Given the high number of farms and frequent water quality issues in Eluru, we are focusing our expansion efforts there, working within 13 villages. These villages are highlighted in purple on this map.

Reasons for Further Expansion

We see various values in expanding the ARA beyond the existing villages and regions:

• Knowledge Generation: Moving to new regions gives us further insights into prevalent welfare issues and potential interventions, further assisting our R&D work. We also learn about common farm properties and different life stages. 

  • For example, when we moved from our first region, Nellore, to Eluru, we realized that farms in Eluru are much bigger, have lower stocking densities, and don’t commonly employ welfare-enhancing practices (e.g., aeration, pond preparation) like farmers in Nellore. These findings informed our welfare intervention research process significantly.

• Building a Skilled Team: In expanding to new areas, we are growing our ARA team. The team also gains valuable skills in program management that will be essential for running any field-based program. 

• Efficient Scale-up of Future Interventions: We may decide to change our intervention based on the results of our R&D studies, and if we do, it will be beneficial to already have farmers organized within an alliance through which we can introduce these welfare improvements.

• Creating Clout: We expect that to successfully help hundreds of millions of fishes in India we will further need to work with local governments. Our experience has shown that having a critical number of farmers involved with our work creates credibility and clout for policy and legal work.

• Helping Fishes: All of the above and, in particular, adding more farms will allow us to help more fishes and thus increase our impact.

Pedapadu: The ARA’s New Region of Expansion

This year, we have already added 40 farms and plan to add 60 more in a new area. Currently, all our farms in the Eluru district are in the Eluru mandal, and we plan to expand to the Pedapadu mandal. For context, a mandal is a geographic unit smaller than a district and similar to a municipality.

This district map of Eluru details which mandal (municipality) we currently work in (purple), new mandals we explored (green), and the new mandal we decided to work in (blue).

We decided on Pedapadu through an extensive scoping process we initiated in March 2024. During this time we visited 10 villages in three different mandals (see the map above), assessing factors such as farm density (scalability), species prevalence (relevance), farming practices (improvement potential), accessibility, and farmers’ openness (tractability).

We considered five main factors during our scoping of new regions for the ARA.

The following reasons make Pedapadu a promising mandal for the ARA's expansion.

• Concentrated aquaculture farming in the mandal’s villages. Nearly 10,000 acres of land are already under aquaculture within 5 villages of Pedapadu.

• The majority of the farmers are growing Indian major carps (our target species).

• Resource efficiency due to the proximity to our existing office in the Eluru mandal, which allows us to reach a maximum number of farmers in Pedapadu.

The entrance of a fish and shrimp farm in Pathamupparru, a village within the Pedapadu mandal where we will expand our program.

The table below details the villages we plan to add in the following months in the order they will be added. The area under aquaculture indicates the scale of aquaculture in these villages. For reference, 100 hectares of aquaculture area may have between 20 and 50 farms. We currently plan to add 15-20 farms in each village, though exact numbers may change as we start adding them.

Village	Mandal	Area under Aquaculture (Ha)
Pathamupparru	Pedapadu	943
Pedapadu	Pedapadu	722
Satyavolu	Pedapadu	1108
Koniki	Pedapadu	848
Gogunta	Pedapadu	451

This table details the villages in the new mandal Pedapadu where we plan to expand the ARA.

We are excited to expand the Alliance for Responsible Aquaculture and share updates on our findings from this new mandal on our blog.

Our ARA team in the Eluru district: Chaitanya, Praveen, Nagaraju, and Sanjay

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Footnotes

1. You may have heard us talk about the districts Nellore and West Godavari in the past. The district of West Godavari has recently been restructured and the areas we work in are now in the district of Eluru.