[3] Hiralal Chaudhuri was born on 21 November 1921 in the village of Kubajpur, adjacent to the Surma Valley in Sylhet (then Srihatta), Assam (in present-day Bangladesh), British India.

In 1955, he obtained an MS degree in Fisheries management from Auburn University in Alabama, USA for his thesis paper on the effect of pituitary injection on pond fish reproduction.

[4] After passing his MSc, he started teaching in the department of biology at Murari Chand College, Sylhet, but lost his job during the Partition of India, along with five of his colleagues.

After taking voluntary retirement from active government service, he joined the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) and served as a deputy director there from 1975–79.

[6][7] While in the center of Barrackpore, he noticed that oval-shaped transparent eggs came out as soon as he pressed the belly of fish floating in the tidal waters on the banks of the Ganges.

At this time, different countries of the world, including Myanmar (then Burma), Lao PDR, Fiji, Sudan, Malaysia, and the Philippines sought his skills for successful fish breeding programs.

[11] In September 1994, A conference on Applications of Endocrinology to Pacific Rim Aquaculture was organised in his honor at the Bodega Merin Laboratory, University of California.