MEL West Bengal

This document is part of the Dried Fish Matters Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning workflow. Deliverables listed here are taken from the Terms of Reference (Schedule B) of contracts between the University of Manitoba and partner organizations for Scoping Research.

Name	Description	Comments	Due
DFM West Bengal political ecology and cultural history	Report of approximately 50-60 pages Interprets dried fish value chains in West Bengal using a political ecology lens Draws on historical documents and oral history interviews Provides a series of narrative case studies (environmental humanities) Covers: power equations, cultural ethos and more-than-human entanglements shaping the empirics of DF value chain in West Bengal.		--
DFM West Bengal Theory: SES / sustainability and resilience report	Report of approximately 50 pages Applies and extends a theoretical model in interpreting the social economy of dried fish in West Bengal	2022-01-12: Review this proposal? Not sure if Sisir's work will fit within this mandate as originally suggested. Comment from Jenia: We need Sisir’s intervention here. We will plan a 2.5 day workshop during winter (November – December) 2021 with two major agendas: Deployment of SES on (DF) VCA – what, why and how Design and development of instrument(s) to conduct field in selected DF sites in West Bengal	--
DFM West Bengal Consumption survey	Analyzes the trends and patterns in dried fish consumption across different geographical regions in West Bengal during the postcolonial period. Interprets consumer behaviour dynamics concerning dried fish consumption vis-à-vis fresh fish and other substitutes like chicken and beef. Identifies some of the critical drivers of and barriers to, if any, the consumption of dried fish. Derives insights from the analysis of consumer behaviour for designing effective policies for hygienic and safe production and marketing of dried fish while ensuring livelihood security of the producers and health and food safety of the consumers. Assesses if there is trade-off between quality and price as well as formal and informal structure which can have implications on affordability of dried fish, especially among the poor.	2022-02-09: Update from Jenia Our market survey has been initiated. Raktima visited the Sheoraphuli market and conducted qualitative interviews with DF actors. She has discussed this in detail with me and we have a plan to write a small report on this in a non-convention and creative format. We will share the updates soon. The market survey in selected sites will start in full swing during Feb.-March. We will be collecting data using DFM tools and context-specific open-ended questions. 2021-12-16: Update from Raktima and Jenia. We sat together with our previously developed tabular template to finalize the design for conducting the market survey during early 2022. After a thorough look into the document and our long discussions on this, we feel the strong impulse to come up with a 'mapping exercise layout' which will clearly demonstrate the different value chain segments, specific spatial nodes of activities, actor-specific/guided exploratory vignettes - and hence the entire market network. We will design it during the last week of December once the first draft of my SLR (Systematic Literature Review) write-up is ready by December 25 (as planned). We will be very happy to share it with you and see what finally turns out from this. For now, we are sharing some fundamental details about our market survey plan which we initially developed (will be retained in our mapping exercise document): i) Survey of activities and actors across all VC segments (upstream-midstream-downstream) ii) Sites - ISD (Sagardwip, Jambudwip, Namkhana-Frasergunj, Mousuni) and Medinipur (Egra, Digha Mohana, Dadanpatrabar, Jaldah, Sankarpur-Tajpur, Junput) iii) Timeline - January 2nd week to March 3rd/4th week iv) Budget - 3,50,000 - 4,00,000 INR (approx.), including travel, accommodation, visualization costs, etc. We will share our next updates with you by the end of this month. TOR taken from Kerala study. The survey instrument is available here: DFM Kerala 2021 Household consumption survey	--
DFM West Bengal Visualization	A set of photographs and/or videos illustrating key aspects of the social economy of dried fish in West Bengal. These should have metadata with place, date, and photographer. Images where faces are visible should only be shared if consent for the photographs has been obtained. Following consultation with IITK, images may be used for DFM Website, presentations, publications, or promotional materials. Photo essay interprets significant images or video clips from the collection.		--
DFM West Bengal synthesis report	50 to 70 page report with references, glossary, maps, images, and methodological appendices Final summary report of dried fish value chain first phase study for West Bengal synthesizing the methods and major findings from all components of the first phase study.	This will be a systematic synthesis and compilation of findings generated from all other research reports within the context of West Bengal.	--
DFM West Bengal Data sharing	Transcripts of interviews conducted using UM funding to DFM internal project database. Each interview record should give date, duration, location, and interviewer along with a summary list of key points from the interview. IITK commits to storing interview notes or transcripts for the duration of the project and for two years after the project’s conclusion in case project participants wish to request access to greater detail on particular topics from them. Identifying information on interview participants to be kept separately from anonymized interview notes and/or transcripts. May be provided as records in a shared QDA database format (Atlas.ti, Nvivo) Should include both content and thematic codes attached to each record	See the TOR for DFYWA Data sharing and DFM Bangladesh online database of field records. From Jenia: It will really be great if you can think of conducting training (for instance: Atlas.ti) on this component, leading to capacity building of country teams and more uniform deliverables.	--
DFM West Bengal publications	Two peer-reviewed publications (journal articles or book chapters) building on earlier reports / deliverables		--
DFM West Bengal literature review	Report of 30-40 pages with supplementary bibliography. Relevant local sources should be listed in an online library using the shared DFM Zotero project database. An English-language abstract and/or translated title should be provided for each item in local language. Digital resources should be attached to the library items where available Particularly significant print resources should be digitized and included in the library.	2022-02-09: Update from Jenia Raktima submitted the first draft of SLR (18000 words, 44 pages) to me one week ago. I went through the document and provided her with detailed feedback on the same. Raktima has also developed a revised outline and a plan to complete each component within the next 10-15 days. In short, we are trying to advance the social economy perspective in the DF sector by accommodating socio-ecological and cultural research using SLR as the methodology. The aim of the article is to flesh out the rationale behind this enriched social economy approach in DF research. We are ambitious to communicate this to a good journal. Once the first draft is ready by this month, we will share it with you to get your comments. 2022-01-03: Update from Raktima i) I will submit the Systematic Literature Review (SLR) report/article by 15th of this month. After an internal review and restructuring of the write-up, I am presently standing on the verge of wrapping it up. ii) We are planning to share with you a detailed and more specific research design, a future roadmap for our research. Me and Jenia di will be working on it once the SLR gets a final shape.	--
DFM West Bengal Zotero library	Relevant local sources should be listed in an online library using the shared DFM Zotero project database. An English-language abstract and/or translated title should be provided for each item. Digital resources should be attached to the library items where available. Particularly significant print resources should be digitized and included in the library.	2022-01-03: Update from Raktima iii) Linking literatures to DFM Zotero library is another task which comes next. Eric has patiently helped me to get this process over. Since some of the literatures of SLR will be overlapping with those of the preliminary Scoping Report, I thought of doing it after the SLR write-up is finalized. I hope that will be fine. Earlier comment from Jenia: This has been accomplished by our team to a large extent. We will keep adding readings, etc. in course of conducting the research and generating outputs.	--
Blue Justice video			--
Amrita Sen webinar			--
DFM West Bengal Markets and market segments overview	This corresponds to "Scoping Report #1" from the original TOR. Report of approximately 50 pages Summarizes the main segments and issues in dried fish value chains in West Bengal	@ericthrift Thanks! I hope you don't mind that the findings are with bullet points. I have finished Bangladesh key location report two weeks ago, just in case you missed it. @waewinkhaing I think 650 words should be OK. I should have time to format and send out the report today or tomorrow. Thanks! Dried Fish in West Bangal_Summary.docx This summary is a bit long because the original report has a lot of points to cover. The current word count of the summary is approx. 650. Let me know if you want me to trim it down. 2022-02-11: @waewinkhaing -- please create a summary document. See the instructions under the Myanmar consumption survey. 2022-02-10: FINAL REVISION https://driedfishmatters.org/files/DFM_RPT_IITK_Revised-Scoping-Report_2022-02-09.docx 2022-01-14: Comments from Eric We don't actually want to request a new revision of this document, but I anticipate that you will be building upon each of the sections of this text in your subsequent reports, so I've put together a list of questions you might want to consider as you write about these topics further (attached). Please take these as suggestions for further points to discuss as the research progresses, rather than as a critique of your current report. Overall this is a very interesting and useful report, which I think has the potential to generate significant discussion as a Working Paper distributed by Dried Fish Matters. Let's get this report cleaned and copy-edited, and out to our network in the next couple of weeks if we can. If you have the time to create a 1-2 page summary of key findings in lay terms, I could post that to our blog to accompany the full document. DFM_MEM_Comments-West-Bengal-report-01.docx 2022-02-09: Updated file received from Raktima. This final version of the report sketching out the dried fish production scenes of coastal West Bengal, sees the light of the day - we are grateful to the DFM Central team and IITK research group. I am happy that the report has come out to be the first output as well as a starting point of my PhD research on dried fish. We are really excited to find it as a published report with the DOI status attached to it. Please note that the author arrangement for the report has been changed and here goes the final author order: Raktima Ghosh, Jenia Mukherjee, Amrita Sen, Souradip Pathak, Anuradha Choudry and Shreyashi Bhattacharya. The report is certainly the outcome of the active participation of Dr. Anuradha Choudry and Ms. Shreyashi Bhattacharya during the field visits. https://driedfishmatters.org/files/DFM_RPT_IITK_Revised-Scoping-Report-01_2021-11-26.docx 2022-01-14: Comments sent by Eric to the DFM West Bengal team. Now move to copy-editing and prepare release. 2022-01-03: Update from Raktima. Revisions are in DFM_RPT_WBG-Scoping-01_2021-06.pdf 2021-12-03: Comments from Derek. I have gone through the current Google docs version of the Scoping Report. It’s an excellent synthesis reference document. I made some minor edits, but will leave a more thorough language edit to our internal DFM process. I added three minor comments. As soon as you can address these final comments, we can move forward with the final language edit and formatting of the report. I do think it would be useful to have the glossary for this report as well as the market study report so I would request that you provide the glossary for this report. There is no big rush on that. We can integrate the glossary after the final DFM edit is finished, which I don’t expect will be completed until early January. https://driedfishmatters.org/files/DFM_RPT_IITK_Revised-Scoping-Report-01_2021-11-26.docx 2021-10-18: Comments from Derek. I like very much the additions that you have made and think that the report is now much stronger. I have made some edits and inserted a number of additional comments requesting clarifications at various points in the text. ... In the next submitted version of the report, please separate out the final section on Immediate Research Plans and Subsequent Actions. I think there’s no need for that as part of the report, rather, it is the basis for a further discussion among us about your plan for the coming six months." DFM_RPT_IITK-Scoping_2021-10-18_DJ-comments.docx 2021-08-18: Updated draft received from Raktima. https://driedfishmatters.org/files/DFM_RPT_WBG-Scoping-01_2021-08-18.docx DFM_RPT_WBG-Scoping-01_Comments-DJ_2021-06_Explanations.pdf 2021-07-19: Returned to Jenia with comments from Derek. Requested section addressing methods. DFM_RPT_WBG-Scoping-01_Comments-DJ_2021-06.pdf 2021-06-27: Draft received from Jenia. DFM_RPT_WBG-Scoping-01_2021-06.pdf	2021-06-15