For the past couple of months, the waters of Mandwa have been freighted with something brown, slimy—and lucrative. In a small cove near the jetty, 15 tonnes of seaweed are suspended from 50 bamboo rafts and 20 longlines in what is Alibag’s—and MMR’s—first commercial seaweed farm.Each raft is a 12-by-12-foot square strung with lines of the algae Kappaphycus alvarezii, like a fuzzy fretboard. A couple of fishers-turned-seaweed farmers weave their canoes between the beds, reaching to check the lines. In a couple of weeks, they’ll be back for the harvest. Mandwa’s Koli community, who once only drew fish and crustaceans from the sea, are now harvesting macroalgae—adding ‘crop’ to ‘catch’. “We’re testing the waters,” says Mahesh Dhake, 42, who gave up fishing when declining catch forced him into a shore job in Uran. “Only half the community today relies exclusively on fishing. And almost all of us are always on the lookout for supplementary income.”An opportunity arose last Oct, when the Mauli Macchimar Sahakari Society, a fishing cooperative that Dhake is part of, was contacted by ClimaCrew, an aquaculture company that incubates seaweed farms, trains communities to manage them, and buys back the produce for market. After conducting site studies to test suitability on factors such as wave activity, seabed type, and water quality, the company sought community buy-in to set up a farm in the sheltered cove. “The area must be unpolluted and free of boat traffic, which is why we conduct both GIS and in situ surveys,” says Devleena Bhattacharjee, director at ClimaCrew. Seaweed cultivation takes 45 days from seed to harvest and can be practised through the year, barring monsoon months. Dhake, who has earned Rs 10,000-12,000 per harvest—Mandwa has had four so far—claims his overall income has grown 30%. (Wet seaweed fetches Rs 20/kg; dry Rs 130.) With Mandwa’s fishers increasingly turning to Alibag’s hospitality sector and Mumbai’s labour markets, only 11 members of the co-op currently work on the project. The five men take home a percentage of total earnings, while the six women earn a daily wage of Rs 400—a gap the cooperative attributes to differences in labour and overhead costs. The women prepare the seed lines while the men build and tow the bamboo rafts to sea, checking the site every other day for six weeks. At harvest, they load the boats and bring the seaweed to shore, where the women sort, dry and pack it for processing.A potential powerhouseIn the ocean, seaweed sequesters carbon and filters heavy metals. When harvested, however, its benefits make it a potential powerhouse of the blue economy. The alga’s bioactive compounds—agar, carrageenan and alginates—are used to thicken ice cream and yoghurt, enhance skincare, and boost pharmaceuticals. Seaweed is also used in fertilisers, biofuels, animal feed, and biodegradable packaging. The central govt promoted seaweed farming through the 2020 Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY), which allocated Rs 640 crore to develop the sector and set a production target of 1.12 million tonnes by 2025. Those targets haven’t been met, however, with seaweed production in 2024 at just 74,083 tonnes and only Rs 195 crore approved for projects by 2025. The challenges are many, starting from a basic lack of awareness about seaweed farming and its market opportunities, says Bhattacharjee, one of only a handful of players linking producers to the market. Farmers have no insurance against cyclones, oil spills or accidents that can wreck rafts. And unlike Tamil Nadu, which has a seed bank, or Gujarat, which is building one, Maharashtra has none.A major obstacle is the lack of a single window for approvals, says Bhattacharjee. Currently, permissions have to be obtained from multiple bodies, including the fisheries department, the panchayat, and the maritime board. The biggest drawback, some say, is the lack of market linkages. “A handful of govt institutions focus on R&D and training, but thereafter, seaweed farmers don’t know what to do,” says Neelkanth Mishra, founder and CEO of Jaljeevika, a nonprofit that has grown a cohort of trained women seaweed farmers in Ratnagiri, from 20 to 200. For the sector to scale, seaweed farmers should be guided toward entrepreneurship, Mishra believes, by making it easier for them to access subsidies, technologies, permits, and product development training. A lack of consistency in quality is another issue, says Neha Jain, founder of ZeroCircle, a company that makes biodegradable packaging from seaweed. This inconsistency stems from poor technical control in cultivation, including poor strain selection, she says. Back in Mandwa, Dhake is more concerned with his coming harvest. “I hope the farm continues to do well,” he says. “I want to save enough to invest in an aquaculture business of my own.”
