I. SUMMARY BACKGROUND The Gulf of Mannar is the broad area of coastal sea lying between the southern tip of India, the south- eastern coast of Tamil Nadu state, and the north-west coast of Sri Lanka. It supports a diverse and productive community of marine life that was famous historically for its pearl oyster banks and large population of the globally-endangered sea mammal, the dugong, reliant on the extensive shallow seagrass meadows. The Gulf has rich inshore fishing grounds that are exploited by large numbers of artisanal and commercial fisherfolk using a variety of gears, including beach seine and throw nets; line, net and trap fishing from small sail and oar-paddled craft; and larger mechanised boats including a large fleet of trawlers. Around the Tamil Nadu coast of the Gulf of Mannar there are several hundred villages and several large towns, including Tuticorin, a rapidly growing commercial and industrial centre and port. For the past thirty years the Indian and Tamil Nadu governments, research institutions and non- governmental organisations have made efforts to develop a conservation system for the Indian half of the Gulf of Mannar that would safeguard the area‟s marine biodiversity while accommodating reasonable levels of resource use and exploitation. Significant measures that have been introduced include the State-wide ban on trawling within 3 nautical miles (nm) of the shore; the 1986 designation of the chain of 21 inshore coral sand islands along the northern Gulf coast and their surrounding shallow coral reefs, seagrass beds and mangrove habitat as the Gulf of Mannar National Park; and the listing of significant marine taxa on the country-wide, prohibited-use Schedule 1 of the Wildlife Protection Act. Overlying these measures, the whole of India‟s Gulf of Mannar was designated as a Biosphere Reserve in 1989, the first such marine conservation area in India and the South Asian region. Ten years aft