The Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute was established by Government of India on February 3rd 1947 under the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare and later it joined the ICAR family in 1967. During the course of over 65 years the Institute has emerged as a leading tropical marine fisheries research institute in the world.
Since its inception, the CMFRI grew significantly in its size and stature and built up adequate research infrastructure and recruited qualified staff. During the first half of the five decades of its existence, the CMFRI devoted its research attention towards the estimation of marine fisheries landings and effort, taxonomy of marine organisms and the bio-economic characteristics of the exploited stocks of finfish and shellfish. This research effort contributed significantly to India’s marine fisheries development from a predominantly artisanal, sustenance fishery till the early sixties to that of a complex, multi-gear, multispecies fisheries.
One of the major achievements of CMFRI is the development and refinement of a unique method for estimation of fishery catch and effort from the over 8000 km coastline called the "Stratified Multistage Random Sampling Method”. With this methodology the Institute is maintaining the National Marine Fisheries Data Centre (NMFDC) with over 9 million catch and effort data records from all maritime states of India of more than 1000 fished species.