Fish farming becomes an industry only when what leaves the pond can pass an audit anywhere in the world.
Kamcha Heankhe is Chairperson of GAMSME’s National Council on Aquaculture and a co-founder of Living Roots Network Private Limited, an aquaculture consulting and technology integration company having its head office at Guwahati. An aquaculture and food safety professional with more than seven years of experience across India, Myanmar and Singapore, she works at the point where fish farming, feed, processing and quality systems meet, building the standards and systems that decide whether a small producer can sell into a formal market. At GAMSME, the council covers farm productivity, feed and health management, food safety certification, cold chain and traceability, and market access for aquaculture and fisheries MSMEs.
From the pond to the processing plant
A postgraduate of the Central Institute of Fisheries Education, Mumbai, with a Master of Fisheries Science in Fish Physiology and Biochemistry, Ms. Heankhe has built a career that runs the full length of the aquaculture value chain. Her years at Trouw Nutrition in Myanmar covered quality management, HACCP and food defence programmes, import and export compliance for raw materials and finished products, and audit leadership for FSSC 22000, alongside a laboratory management role spanning LIMS, near infrared calibration and analytical validation. A move to Texchem Marine Labutta meant building prerequisite programmes, GMP and HACCP systems for seafood processing from the ground up, establishing cold chain traceability and an in-house laboratory, leading GAqP certification for a crab farm, and securing regulatory approval for both factory and farm.
Standards, systems and the technology behind them
At the Aquaculture Centre of Excellence in Singapore, her work has been the implementation of ISO 22000 and GAP SS670 at a closed containment floating fish farm, integrating food safety control with sustainable production, total quality management and ESG reporting. Feed formulation for seabass and threadfin sits alongside it, aligning nutrition with growth and fish health rather than treating the two as separate problems. The digital side of that work matters just as much: LabVantage LIMS, Aquanetix farm management, Kytos health management for barramundi, and quality dashboards that turn routine records into decisions a farm manager can act on the same day.
Building capability, not just compliance
Certification only holds if the people running the farm or the unit understand why each control exists. That conviction runs through a parallel track of training work, first with the LINAC and NCDC Fisheries Business Incubation Centre under the Government of India, where she delivered practical GHP, GMP and HACCP training to entrepreneurs, cooperatives and progressive fish farmers, and more recently with MANAGE, at its Centre for Innovation and Agripreneurship, on aquaculture technology, innovation and enterprise development for agri startups and scholars.
Building the delivery side
Standards and training only travel so far without an organisation to carry them into the field. As a co-founder of Living Roots Network Private Limited, headquartered in Guwahati with its primary focus on North East India, she helps run a company built to do exactly that: consulting for aquaculture development, integration of technologies from partners in India and abroad, project management, and market connect for producers, cooperatives and enterprises. The intent is practical, to give a hatchery operator, a fish farmer group or a small processor a single route to the technical advice, the systems and the buyers they would otherwise have to assemble one relationship at a time.
At GAMSME
As Chairperson of the National Council on Aquaculture, Ms. Heankhe leads GAMSME’s work on the fisheries and aquaculture sector, where the gap between what Indian farmers produce and what buyers will pay a premium for is largely a gap in systems. The council’s focus spans hatchery and grow out productivity, species specific feed and health management, food safety and certification readiness for small processors, cold chain and traceability infrastructure, digital farm and quality management, and domestic and export market linkage. It also anchors GAMSME’s engagement with fisheries departments, research institutions, financial agencies and development partners, so that aquaculture MSMEs, producer companies and fish farmer groups can move from subsistence production to formal, audit ready enterprise.