The National Centre for Sustainable Aquaculture (NaCSA), is an outreach organisation of MPEDA and was registered in 2007 at Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh as a welfare society under the AP Societies Registration Act, 2001. NaCSA started grouping the aquafarmers into societies and educating them on Better Management practices (BMP) for safe and sustainable shrimp farming.

The formation of NaCSA was necessitated by the large scale outbreak of White Spot Shrimp Disease which devastated the export oriented shrimp farming in the late nineties. MPEDA with the technical co-operation of the Network of Aquaculture Centres in Asia Pacific (NACA) has undertaken several studies, and implementation of Better Management Practices (BMP’s) and cluster farming approach were found to be effective tools to bring down the disease occurrence in shrimp farms.

Objectives of NaCSA:

The long term objective of NaCSA is to enable the farmers to adopt sustainable and environmental friendly farming practices to produce quality and safe shrimp for exports. It’s function as the prime mover of the extension activities among aquaculture farmers and also provide common infrastructure facilities  for farming besides establishing disease diagnostic testing laboratories like Aqua One Centres(AOC’s) and provide better marketing opportunities like e-santa for direct sale of shrimps with increased price realization for farmers.

Present activities of NaCSA:

  • NaCSA has so far organised 943 societies of which 752 Societies were registered with the concerned Society Registration Departments in 9 states.
  • Conducted 514 awareness campaigns against the use of antibiotics, organised 12595 meetings for Societies.
  • Established 20 disease diagnostic labs called Aqua One Centres and Conduct Water quality tests/soil tests/disease diagnostic service etc. for society farmers.
  • Collected 827 samples from society farms for Disease Surveillance Programme and collected 1126 NRCP samples.
  • Facilitating establishment of common infrastructure in farming areas through Financial Assistance of MPEDA and extended assistance to the tune of Rs.514 lakh. Construction of three cross over bridges at East Godavari and Srikakulam districts are proposed and the tendering process of one of the two bridges in EG dist. is at an advanced stage.
  • Established an e-commerce platform titled eSaNta facilitating direct sale of shrimp from farmers to exporters avoiding middlemen and the same is inaugurated by Hon’ble Minister of Commerce & Industry on 13/04/2021.
  • For empowering the society farmers with easy access to quality inputs, credit, marketing avenues, NaCSA is being restructured with forward and backward linkage under MSCS Act 2002.