Indian American biotech firm to boost shrimp farming

Tuesday, 04 March 2003, 20:30 IST
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BANGALORE: An Indian American-promoted biotech company has signed a pact with Karnataka to revive the shrimp farming industry on India's west coast with an investment of $20 million. Biogenus India, a subsidiary of the Colarado-based $500 million biotech company, would set up a marine biotech research station in Uttara Kannada district to indigenise "media" or microbes for "defined shrimp farming". The company is also investing a probiotics and third generation enzymes production facility in Bangalore to produce 10,000 tonnes of enzymes and 5,000 tonnes of microbial cultures for bio-remediation. "The farmers only need to follow the guidelines to use our media that will be cheaper than the feed that they purchase," said K.S. Reddy, CEO, Biogenus India. He was speaking at the sidelines of the signing of the memorandum of understanding with Karnataka. "The aquaculture industry failed in the 1990s because people thought it was an art and not science and gambled when it was pure business." "The microbes or the media will help in clearing the stress of pollution, provide nutrients as well as oxygen at the bottom rather than at the top as was the perception of the farmers earlier," said Utkarsh Palnitkar, director, Ernst and Young, consultants for the project. Biogenus India will conduct research on its patented media in a unique private-public collaboration with the National Institute of Oceanography to indigenise the media. The brackish water pilot-farming project would be spread over 1,500 acres of land in Uttara Kannada district. "The technical demonstration is currently on and the first plant for the aqua media would start by the end of this year," Reddy added. "After the experience of the 1990s, when shrimp farming bottomed out, this arrangement gives India the opportunity to re-look at shrimp farming in a big way," Palnitkar said. India's seafood industry earns the country foreign exchange of $9 billion, exporting shrimps, finfish, cuttlefish and squid across the world. Ernst and Young is scheduled to submit the feasibility reports and business plans later this month. But Biogenus chairman M.S. Reddy, the Indian American who has 140 patents to his credit, said that some venture capital companies as well as other funding agencies had already shown interest in the project. Reddy, founder of the International Media and Cultures (IMAC) of which Biogenus is a spin-off, is a bacteriologist, virologist and microbiologist. Biogenus is expected to start bio-remediation of the Hussain Sagar Lake in Hyderabad to clear it of all pollution and make the fish edible. "It is currently filled with so much of effluents and the fish is packed with chromium and lead because of the immersion of idols. We are prepared to take up other lakes in Bangalore and Karnataka to clean them up," Reddy said.
Source: IANS
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