Vol.:(0123456789) Aquaculture International https://doi.org/10.1007/s10499-021-00797-0 1 3 Socio‑demographic profling and asset indicators of Gracilaria dura farmers from northern west coast of India useful for longitudinal analysis Yashesh Shah, et al. [full author details at the end of the article] Received: 24 June 2021 / Accepted: 26 October 2021 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Abstract Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Government of India, has recently rolled out its fagship scheme ‘Pradhan Mantri Matsya Sampada Yojana (PMMSY)’, aimed at ambitious expansion of the domestic seaweed sector. Consequently, it gave emphasis on diverting the focus from a monoculture of Kappaphycus alvarezii to other candidate spe- cies, Gracilaria dura—which yields high quality agar—is an ideal example. Furthermore, currently agar requirement for the country is 400 tonnes year −1 and 4,000 tonnes dry of feedstock is needed to cater to this demand. With this backdrop, commercial farming of G. dura has been initiated along the northern west coast of India. We interviewed 20 house- holds from two coastal villages, namely, Simar and Rajpara to document their socio-demo- graphic profling and computing livelihood asset index. The total literacy rate of Simar was found to be 25% and Rajpara was 20%, with population of 7445 and 12,000 respectively. Demographic analysis revealed equal gender participation; a higher proportion of seaweed growers (30%) were under the age group of 21–30 years; 15% exclusively dealt with sea- weed farming (while others relied on additional livelihood source); spending from earn- ing had positive implications on various aspects, namely, household food security, improv- ing their purchasing power to meet daily requirements (50%), education to their children (30%); followed by savings (10%) and medical and other expenditure (10%). The ‘human asset index’ was found to be 0.487, while the ‘natural asset index’ was 0.376; the ‘physical asset index’ was 0.69; the ‘fnancial asset index’ was 0.205; the ‘social asset index’ (SAI) was 0.557, while the ‘total livelihood asset index’ was 2.315. To the best of our knowledge, asset indicators have been frst time recorded for seaweed farmers from anywhere in the word for longitudinal analysis. The data will be useful to researchers and policy-makers for household welfare dynamics studies. Keywords Aquaculture · Gracilaria dura · Livelihood asset index · Socio-demographic profling Handling Editor: Dr. Gavin Burnell Yashesh Shah and Manali Rathod contributed equally to this study.