The Bay of Bengal News(BBN) has entered upon its 26th year – after 80 issues, about 1 000 articles and several hundred photographs. This issue goes beyond the statistics to recall highlights of a quarter century of a small but power-packed newsletter. We have also recorded the perceptions of some readers about BBN – what it has meant to them, how well it has chronicled the many-faceted multi-disciplinary work of BOBP in helping small-scale fisheries and fisher folk communities in the Bay of Bengal region.
I first came across the Bay of Bengal News during the late1980s. An article on shrimp fry culture in West Bengal, India, caught my eye. I haven’t missed another issue of BBN. It reported and analyzed work of the Bay of Bengal Program me – concerning technologies and socio-economics in small-scale fisheries and the lives of fisher folk communities in seven countries surrounding the Bay. The BBN was always well-researched, concisely and beautifully presented– a pleasure to go through .I carefully preserved every issue in a leather-bound jacket. Little did I realize that I would one day be the editor-publisher of the BBN..read more