Ocean Literacy in India: Why the People Who Know the Sea Best Are Left Out

Published: 6 October 2026

Indian fisher in a traditional boat illustrating ocean literacy

In 2024, a team of Indian researchers published a study in Scientific Reports mapping where dugongs still live in Indian waters. To find the animals, they needed records of where dugongs had been seen. Their own boat surveys in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands produced six such records. Their drone surveys produced three. The dataset they actually built for those islands held 634.

The rest came from fishers.

Ocean literacy is the formal name for this subject. The National Marine Educators Association defines it as “an understanding of the ocean’s influence on you and your influence on the ocean”, and NOAA uses the same words. The idea is two-way by design. What it does not settle is whose understanding gets written down.

What ocean literacy actually means

The definition above is the one the field agrees on, and four separate bodies state it compatibly: the National Marine Educators Association, NOAA, UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission and the European Commission. They are not four independent arrivals at the same conclusion. They are one framework, built through a consensus process in United States marine education, adopted widely. That is worth knowing before treating the definition as neutral ground.

Underneath it sits a structure of seven Essential Principles, covering things like the ocean’s role in climate and its connection to human life. You can read them at source in a few minutes, and this article will not repeat them, because the interesting movement in the field has been elsewhere.

In 2023, McKinley, Burdon and Shellock proposed in Marine Pollution Bulletin that ocean literacy be widened from a knowledge checklist to ten dimensions. Alongside knowledge and communication they named access and experience, emotional connection, adaptive capacity, and trust and transparency. Their stated reason was to ensure ocean literacy “encompasses diverse knowledges, values and experiences”. The point of that expansion is straightforward: whether you understand the sea depends on whether you can reach it, whether you have any feeling for it, and whether you trust the people telling you about it. None of that is a fact you can be taught.

There is an institutional frame for this. Challenge 10 of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development, which runs from 2021 to 2030 under UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, is to restore society’s relationship with the ocean. Its aim is to strengthen the connection between people and the sea so that people across all sectors can act in ways that keep the ocean healthy.

The field is also candid about how far it has got. Writing in the ICES Journal of Marine Science in 2025, Glithero and colleagues note that community-engaged science prioritising multiple knowledge systems is “increasingly acknowledged rhetorically” but “has yet to be widely applied”. That sentence is doing a lot of work. The intention is on the record. The practice is not there yet.

The record has an authorship pattern, and it is measured

This is where the argument stops being a matter of taste.

Three separate research teams, using three different methods, have looked at who produces ocean-literacy research and reached the same answer.

A 2025 systematic scoping review in Environmental Education Research examined 122 articles on ocean-literacy education. Europe accounted for 46 of them and North America for 30. At the other end, Latin America accounted for 9 and Africa for 3. Those four figures are the largest and smallest regions, not a complete breakdown of the 122.

A separate 2024 systematic map in Marine Policy took a different measure across 298 articles, splitting them into 181 peer-reviewed and 117 grey-literature items. It found that first authors from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland and Portugal accounted for more than half of everything included. Note what that measures: not where the research happened, but whose name went first on it. Say a researcher in Chennai publishes as second author on a British-led paper. She does not appear in that figure at all.

And a 2024 paper in Frontiers in Marine Science states the pattern directly: reviews of ocean-literacy publications and collaborations show “a geographical skew towards North America and Europe, with a significant gap in the global South”.

One limit belongs on all three. These reviews searched predominantly English-language academic databases. What they measure with confidence is the concentration of English-language published research. They do not measure ocean knowledge itself, and neither should you read them that way.

The same 2024 paper asks the question this article is built around. Its authors call for examining “whose voices, from what communities, are dominant?” That question came from inside the field, not from outside it.

What this looks like from an Indian coast

Search Google from India, in English, on a desktop, for “ocean literacy” and then for “ocean storytelling”. As captured on 27 August 2026, the first pages returned sixteen organic results between them. Not one was an Indian site or an India-focused page. The set was UNESCO, a United States educators’ association, ScienceDirect, a British charity, the European Commission, NOAA, a Canadian charity, a Swiss and South African foundation, a British magazine, a British network, a Canadian education body, a British photographer, and a United States university centre.

That observation has edges, and they matter. This was one capture, on one day, in one language, on one device, covering first pages only. Search results change, so repeating it later will not return exactly the same list. Ocean-literacy material published in Hindi, Tamil, Malayalam or Marathi is invisible to an English-language search entirely. None of this is evidence that India is absent from ocean literacy. What it shows is what an Indian reader searching in English saw that morning.

Set that against the size of the Indian stake.

In April 2025 the Government of India promulgated a revised official coastline length: about 11,098 km, up from the 7,516.6 km figure long held in Ministry of Home Affairs records, and covering the mainland along with the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep. No land was added. The National Hydrographic Office and Survey of India remeasured using GIS and high-resolution high-water-line data, and Survey of India attributes the difference to “the probable variation in scale and calculation methods”. Measure a coast more finely and it gets longer. That is a known property of coastlines, and it also describes what happens when you listen more closely to a place.

Along that coast, the Marine Fisheries Census 2010, conducted jointly by CMFRI and the Department of Animal Husbandry, Dairying and Fisheries, counted 3,288 marine fishing villages and 864,550 marine fishermen households. On the size of the workforce the government’s own figures differ: CMFRI describes marine fisheries as employing nearly four million people, while the Department of Fisheries Handbook on Fisheries Statistics 2022 reports 4.9 million engaged in the sector. The two are twelve years apart and do not define the count identically, so the honest figure is a range, roughly four to five million people, and not a single number.

Those are millions of people conducting a daily, unbroken observation of Indian waters. The question is what happens to what they see.

Counted as data, absent as authors

Return to the dugong study.

Seal and fifteen co-authors set out to identify which dugong habitats in Indian waters most need protection, across the Gulf of Kachchh, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and Palk Bay and the Gulf of Mannar. Their method depends entirely on knowing where dugongs have actually been, because a habitat model can only be as good as the sightings fed into it.

Their Methods section is unusually clear about where those sightings came from. “Historical information on dugong occurrences was curated from the questionnaire surveys of fisherfolk,” they write, describing surveys run between 2012 and 2013 and again between 2018 and 2021. They add sighting locations “from a volunteer network comprising representatives from the fisher community, the Indian Navy, the Indian Coast Guard, and State Forest Departments”. Direct records from the team’s own work are listed as “a few”: six from boat-based surveys and three from drone-based surveys, both at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands.

The curated datasets that resulted held 64 occurrence records at the Gulf of Kachchh, 634 at the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and 508 at Palk Bay and the Gulf of Mannar. The study’s headline finding is that less than 15% of the high-risk areas it identified across the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Palk Bay and the Gulf of Mannar fall inside existing protected areas.

Nothing about this is improper. Questionnaire surveys of fishers are a legitimate and well-established method, and using them is good practice rather than a shortcut. The researchers did the right thing.

But look at what the arrangement produces. Fishers supplied the observations. Scientists supplied the model, the analysis and the argument. The paper carries sixteen names, and the people who saw the animals are not among them. Their knowledge entered the record as a data layer.

This is the distinction the whole subject turns on, and it is easy to get wrong in both directions. Indian fishers are not ignored by marine science. Their observations are used extensively, and this study is proof of it. What they are largely absent from is authorship: the part where you decide what the observation means, what question is worth asking, and what should be done about the answer. Being counted is not the same as being heard.

The field has a term for what they hold. Local ecological knowledge means what people who work a place daily know about it from repeated, direct observation. It differs from formal science in how it is recorded and validated. It does not differ in whether it is accurate.

Where I stand, and what the evidence does not show

I think the range of people telling ocean stories changes what gets protected, and I think India loses something real by having so few of its own coastal voices in that record.

That is a position, and its status should be exact. No source in this article shows that a more diverse set of narrators produces better conservation outcomes. No such evidence surfaced anywhere in the research behind it. What the sources support is narrower: that ocean-literacy authorship is measurably concentrated, that researchers in the field are themselves calling for wider inclusion, and that local knowledge demonstrably produces usable science. None of that adds up to a proven causal chain, and presenting it as one would be the same failure the article is describing.

So the argument rests on something simpler. A question set by people who have never worked a coast will tend to be a different question. The dugong paper asked where dugongs are and which habitats need protection. A fisher in Palk Bay, given authorship rather than a questionnaire, might have asked what happens to the household when the habitat is protected. Both questions are worth asking. Only one of them was.

How a voice actually enters the record

None of this is solved by encouragement. Knowing the routes that already exist is more useful.

Funded storytelling. The Save Our Seas Foundation’s Ocean Storytelling Film Grant is built for people who are not yet established. Eligibility is restricted to applicants with no more than five years of professional experience in any film-related discipline, the award is US$50,000 towards producing a short film, and the foundation states it especially encourages women and applicants from underrepresented communities. Its page records no nationality restriction. Rounds open and close annually and the terms change, so check the programme directly for what is currently offered.
Community and citizen observation. The volunteer network in the dugong study is a working example rather than a hypothetical. It brought together fisher-community representatives, the Indian Navy, the Indian Coast Guard and State Forest Departments, and its sightings became part of a peer-reviewed national assessment. Networks like it need people who are already on the water.
The institutional door. UNESCO’s IOC runs a public Ocean Literacy Portal, and a Decade Coordination Office named Connecting People and Ocean, based at the UNESCO-IOC office in Venice, leads work on Challenge 10. Treat it as a starting point for finding the programmes, not a shortcut past them.

The first two matter more than the third. Authorship is not usually granted from above.

Conclusion

Six sightings from a boat. Three from a drone. Six hundred and thirty-four in the finished dataset. That ratio is not a criticism of the researchers, who used the best available method and said so plainly. It describes where ocean knowledge in India actually comes from, and how little of it carries the name of the person who saw it first.

If you dive, fish, or live on a coast, you are already producing ocean literacy in the sense the field means it. The practical question is not whether to start. It is whether what you notice ends up as someone’s data point or as your account, and the routes above are the difference between the two.

When knowledge about a coast is built from what its people saw, whose name should be on it?