The Hindu Business Line : Pisciculture not agriculture: SC

CAN you call `fish' livestock? Is fish farming agriculture? For answers to these basic questions, you would have to study a recent judgment of the Supreme Court in Maheshwari Fish Seed Farm vs the Tamil Nadu Electricity Board.

The story begins with a benign notification of the TNEB to supply low-tension electricity free for agriculture. The appellant company, engaged in fish farming, claimed benefit of the notification stating that pisciculture (that is, breeding, hatching and rearing of fish under controlled conditions) is "only a specie of agriculture." No, said the Board, and so did the Madras High Court when the case was taken up there. Thus, the "short question" before the apex court Justices R.C. Lahoti and Ashok Bhan was "whether pisciculture is agriculture?"

Since the word agriculture is not defined in the Tamil Nadu Revision of Tariff Rates on Supply of Electrical Energy Act, the court had to examine how the word is understood among agriculturists. Dictionaries came in handy for the purpose and the court referred to The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Oxford Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Invention and Technology, McGraw-Hill Encyclopaedia of Science & Technology and so on, to see how they defined agriculture and aquaculture. Mr T.L.V. Iyer, arguing for the company, had cited before the High Court, excerpts from more sources such as Text Book of Fish Culture, Breeding and Cultivation of Fish by Marcel Huet, Fresh Water Fish Pond Culture and Management by Joan Koster and Fresh Water Aquaculture by Dr Rajendra Kumar Rath.

However, the apex court found a useful precedent in Commissioner of Income-tax West Bengal, Calcutta vs Benoy Kumar Sahas Roy decided by a three-judge Bench. There, it had been observed that the term `agriculture' cannot be confined merely to the production of grain and food products for human beings and beasts but must be understood as comprising all the products of the land which have some utility either for consumption or for trade and commerce.

With that as the basis, the apex court said in the current case that agriculture can be extended as comprising within its meaning all the products of the land involving human labour "but then it is the producing capacity of the land which must necessarily be found as involved in any activity to amount to agriculture."

Mr Iyer made a valiant attempt, as this excerpt from the judgment would show: "The learned senior counsel submitted that the fisheries too are treated as profits of the soil over which the water flows. Soil provides nutrients and also contributes to the pond's fertility, which contributes to development of aqua products, including fishes. Enlarging his submission the learned senior counsel submitted that it is the soil which retains water; it stores and releases the nutrients to the overlying water; and water in contact with bottom soil acquires nutrients from the soil, atmospheric gases and absorbs solar energy in the form of radiation essential for the activities of aquatic animals. These inter-dependence between soil and aqua products enable the fish being called a product of soil and, therefore, fish farming is agriculture." The court said: "We cannot agree."

What went against the company were the following lines of reasoning given by the court: that a person engaged in aquaculture is not called a farmer; activity of aquaculturists is purely commercial; and a farmer would be an agriculturist in the traditional sense of the term. Therefore, pisciculture is a branch of aquaculture; it is not agriculture, ruled the court.

Also, livestock animals such as horses, cattle, sheep and pigs "are associated with agriculture as they either help in carrying out agricultural operations or they are domestically maintained in agricultural fields because they can feed on products or byproducts of agriculture in its narrow sense." Disappointingly for the company, "Fishes are not domestic animals and are not included within the meaning of the term `livestock,'" noted the judgment.

A case, one may say, of fishing in troubled waters, or trouble in fish-y matters.

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