The Indian Cow: Almost Extinct

India is the world’s largest producer of milk. But in 10 years, we will be forced to start importing it. And the Indian cow will no longer exist.

Tehelka, 24 January, 2013

MILK IN INDIA, is not just a drink, it is an elixir. For almost every Indian — rich or poor — the idea of a daily glass of milk holds a potent and emotional charge. It speaks of parental devotion, well-being and health. This faith in the power of milk is well-grounded: it is the primary nutrient for the young and the old. Nearly 63 percent of animal protein in the Indian diet comes from dairy products. For vegetarians, there is simply no alternative.

The idea of the cow, of course, is also emotively charged because of its mythical place in Hindu iconography, religion and culture: it is quite literally worshipped as goddess Kamdhenu: the cow of plenty. Premchand famously captured its centrality to Indian village life with his memorable tableau of grazing herds returning home at dusk in a cloud of dust, creating the magic hour of “godhuli”.

Again, this veneration is founded in hard pragmatics. Traditionally, India has been home to some of the most varied stock of cows in the world: the red-skinned Sahiwal that milks through droughts, the mighty Amrit Mahal with swords for horns or the tiny Vechur that stands no taller than a dog. Different breeds to suit different climatic conditions. These cows have been the most crucial backbone of India’s rural economy. Low on maintenance costs, their milk yield has not only been a succor and source of nutrition for otherwise impoverished families, their surplus has been sold by small farmers to State-run cooperatives and private companies, which further package and sell them to urban households under brands such as Amul, Vijaya, Verka, Saras, Nestle and Britannia.

The importance of cows to India’s economy, therefore, just cannot be overestimated. India is the world’s largest producer of milk. A whopping 68 percent of these milch animals are owned by small and landless farmers; their produce is distributed through over one lakh village milk cooperatives, which have more than 1.1 crore members. These arteries interconnect every strata of the country. In fact, milk is a bigger driving force for India’s agro-economy than paddy, wheat or sugar.

But in a mere 10 years, all of this could disappear. India is at the precipice of a disaster that no one seems to be trying to avert. In the run up to India’s 66th Republic Day, here’s a really sobering thought: the indigenous Indian cow — one of the country’s biggest assets — will soon cease to exist and we will be forced to import milk within a decade. This is going to have catastrophic and unimagined impact on lakhs of people.

Predictably, an almost criminal lack of government planning and foresight is responsible for this. India does possess the world’s biggest cattle herd, but typically, the individual yield of these malnourished cows is very low. Merely helping small farmers increase their cows’ food and water intake could have had miraculous results. (Indian cows, for instance, are doing really well in Brazil. In 2011, a pure Gir named Quimbanda Cal broke its own 2010 record of delivering 10,230 litres of milk a year, with a daily yield of 56.17 litres.) But instead of focussing on — and improving — the reasons why the yield of these cows was low in India, the government in the 1960s started crossbreeding Indian cows with imported bulls and semen.

Red Sindhi AVERAGE YIELD 6 kg | POTENTIAL 25 kg As much valued as Sahiwals for their milking prowess, this breed is slightly smaller and belongs to Sindh, now in Pakistan, Photo: Courtesy NBAGR

Sahiwal AVERAGE YIELD 7 kg | POTENTIAL 25-30 kg The best dairy breed of the subcontinent belonged to undivided Punjab. Post-Partition, much of its home tract belonged to Pakistan and the numbers have rapidly dwindled in India, Photo: Courtesy NBAGR

This practice was followed more indiscriminately with every passing decade. Over time, it’s triggered a two-pronged crisis. On the one hand, it has set off a systemic destruction of the indigenous Indian cow, which includes precious breeds developed over a millennium. On the other hand, the new exotic crossbreeds have not adapted to Indian conditions yet. In theory, these crossbreeds are capable of very high milk yields, but their capacity suffers drastically as the cows are very vulnerable to tropical weather and diseases. Unlike the indigenous cow, they also need to be kept in very high-cost, air-cooled, all-weather shelters, and require expensive stall feeding and medical care.

Clearly, the small farmer is not equipped to bear these costs of rearing exotic crossbreeds. But because of official negligence, the low-maintenance, weather-resistant local breeds are continuing to deteriorate. Rearing cattle, therefore, is fast becoming unviable for small farmers. Lakhs of them are facing a loss of livelihood; soon their families will not have access to their basic daily glass of milk — unless they can afford to buy it from big dairies with deep pockets.

But the brewing crisis does not end there. The obliteration of the desi cow will impact urban consumers too. In the next 10 years, as the new order of industrial dairy production begins to dominate, from being self-sufficient, India will not only have to import a large percentage of its milk demand, but will also become heavily dependent on importing everything from exotic semen to cattle feed for the exotic crossbreeds reared within the country. By controlling these key inputs, foreign markets will eventually decide the price we pay for exotic milk. Incidentally, unlike the milk from desi breeds, this milk is unsuitable for those susceptible to diabetes and cardiovascular problems.

Rathi

AVERAGE YIELD 5-6 kg | POTENTIAL 20-25 kg

Mostly found in Bikaner and Ganganagar districts of Rajasthan
and parts of Punjab, adjoining to Rajasthan. These are
medium-sized animals with short horns,
Photo: Courtesy NBAGR

The advantages of the exotic crossbreeds are also extremely shortlived: their yield may be higher in the short term but they also run dry much quicker. Even exotic bulls are not nearly as hardy as the desi ones.  This is triggering a separate crisis. Millions of these crossbreeds are being abandoned by owners the moment they run dry as they cannot afford their high-nutrition diet and costly healthcare. Not only are feral cattle a civic nuisance, supporting these unproductive animals is stretching the country’s already limited resources. According to a recent survey by the Punjab Gausewa Board (PGB), 80 percent of the state’s nearly one lakh stray cattle are exotic crossbreeds. Alarmed, the PGB Chairman Kimti Bhagat is leading an agitation against the state’s pro-exotic policy.

Finally, as the gene pool of the indigenous Indian cow is allowed to fade away, if some epidemic triggers a population slide in our cattle — already made vulnerable by its high percentage of exotic strains — there will be no scope for corrective intervention.

So here we are, heading with suicidal speed towards jeopardising our food security, ruining the backbone of our agro-economy and handing the control of our dairy industry to foreign markets. There are many reasons why India is poised on the edge of this disaster: each of them reads like a novella of frustration.

Gir AVERAGE YIELD 5-6 kg | POTENTIAL 20-30 kg The prized breed of Gujarat is highly valued for its milk and beef in Latin America. It was also used in North America to develop the Brahman breed. Gir animals are still available in good numbers in India, Photo: Courtesy NBAGR

ONE OF the main reasons for India’s looming milk crisis — and the disappearance of India’s desicows — is a faulty premise in official thinking about exotic crossbreeds (which no government has tried to revise despite contrary facts on ground). Add to this, a deliberate misrepresentation of the viability of desi cows and you have a window into why India will soon become an import-dependent nation.

Here’s how the story unfolds. Since 1951, milk production in India has jumped from 17 to 122 million tonnes. This might seem a positive figure, but the number is deceptively misleading because India also has the highest number of cattle in the world — 200 million — which brings the average yield per animal in milk down to only 3.23 kg. The global average is 6.68 kg.

In the next 10 years, the projected demand for milk in India will touch 180 million tones. The National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) warns that if India cannot keep pace, it will have to start importing milk, leading to higher consumer prices.

Unfortunately, the response to this warning is completely knee-jerk. Governments across the country are racing to replace the desi cow even faster with exotic crossbreeds. Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal is planning an advanced institute of dairy farming in Mohali, in collaboration with an Israeli firm. Earlier, the state had roped in an American company to source high-quality semen. In Kerala, the animal husbandry department wants to import improved cattle breeds from Denmark to crossbreed with local cows. The NDDB itself is planning to import 100 high-yield Holstein Friesian and 300 Jersey bulls in the next five years.

Kankrej

AVERAGE YIELD 3-4 kg | POTENTIAL 15 kg

Also known as Wadhiar, Kankrej is one of the heaviest Indian
breeds and belongs to the region southeast to the Rann of
Kutch in Gujarat, Photo: Courtesy NBAGR

At a surface glance, this might seem a great option. Rajbir Singh, a middle-range farmer, who owns a large dairy farm in a village near Karnal in Haryana might certainly think so. In 2009, two of his Friesian crossbred cows — Ganga and Yamuna — were showcased by the National Dairy Research Institute in Karnal as India’s highest ever milk yielders at 51.5 and 59.5 kg a day.Last year, Yamuna, the younger of the two, died of reasons still unidentified. But Ganga remains the most remarkable of many success stories in the region where 30-35 kg milk from exotic crossbreeds is commonplace. Governments across the decades too have routinely bought into this idea that imported exotics would achieve a daily yield of 30 kg and above. Unfortunately, the facts on ground prove otherwise. Success stories like Ganga are rare: despite the huge costs in rearing them, the national average yield from exotic crossbreed cows in India stands at 6.62kg.

Contrast this with Israel. In just four decades, a dairy-deprived Israel has developed its own Friesian crossbreed cattle that have consistently started giving 26 kg of milk daily. After five decades of expensive effort, the exotic crossbreeds in India produce only one-fourth that quantity. Despite this, governments insist on pursuing this policy. Their defence is that even at 6.62 kg, the average yield of exotic crossbreeds in India is still thrice that of desi cows, which averages at 2.2 kg.

It would’ve been a relief if even that fig leaf had been true. Unfortunately, it is not. A crucial defect in India’s myopic milk policy is an over-valuation of the benefits of exotic crossbreeds and an undervaluation of the robustness of desi cows.

Tharparkar

AVERAGE YIELD 4-5 kg | POTENTIAL 15-20 kg

Also known as White Sindhi, these are hardy animals known 

for their ability to cross the Thar desert with a single drink of 

water. Larger than Red Sindhis, Tharparkars are also good 

as drought animals, Photo: Courtesy NBAGR

INDIAN COW breeds are a crucial part of the country’s ecological heritage. Since ancient times, different breeds were developed in different parts of the subcontinent by selecting the best animals for preferred traits such as their milking capacity, draught power, feeding requirements, capacity to adapt to local weather, immunity, etc. The purity of such breeds was maintained with great discipline and wisdom in each geographical pocket known as a breeding tract.

Over time, unfortunately, this social rigour was lost. Indiscriminate mating between different breeds and inferior animals within the same breed resulted in a high number of cattle of poor genetic quality. These non-descript animals today accounts for 80 percent of India’s cattle. At no point, in the past 65 years, did any government think of stepping in to preserve the careful science of crossbreeding.

But this dismal scenario is still not an accurate picture of the desi cow. India has 37 pure cattle breeds. Five of these — Sahiwal, Gir, Red Sindhi, Tharparkar and Rathi — are known for their milking prowess. A few others, such as Kankrej, Ongole and Hariana, belong to dual breeds that have both milch and draught qualities; ie, they are good plough animals. The rest are pure draught breeds.

But when official data records the average yield of indigenous cows as 2.2 kg daily, it clubs these dual breeds and non-dairy draught breeds together with the five top milch breeds. This deliberately undermines the performance of India’s best milch cows — such as Girs and Rathis — to establish the supremacy of the exotic cattle.

“Over the years, this has justified a policy that discards Indian milch breeds to promote exotic crossbreed animals. Due to this neglect, quality desi cows have become rare. So dairy farmers are easily lured to exotic cattle that start milking at a younger age but often trip soon after,” explains a senior official in the Department of Animal Husbandry, Union Ministry of Agriculture, on condition of anonymity.

Echoing this official’s views, a senior veterinarian at a government hospital in Mumbai says ruefully, “First we blame our cows for low milk yield without considering the field constraints. Then we replace those cows with exotic breeds that are more vulnerable to the same constraints. Meanwhile, our desi breeds keep setting new records abroad.”

But it’s not just Quimbanda Cal — the Gir wonder in Brazil — that is proof of how desi cows can perform with adequate support and care. There are enough examples back home.

Satyajit Khachar, for instance, has a Gir farm at Jasdan in Gujarat; he also exports bulls to Brazil. His best cows produce milk in excess of 30 kg daily; his farm average is between 18-20 kg per cow. Khachar’s farm does not necessarily have to be a startling exception. Every year, the government’s own Central Herd Registration Scheme records a number of Girs with 10-14 kg daily yield. In Rajasthan, the Urmul Trust promotes the indigenous Rathi cow in 10 villages each in Bikaner and Ganganagar districts. The average daily yield of these Rathis is between 8-10 kg, while the best produce up to 25 kg a day.

Ongole

AVERAGE YIELD 2-4 kg | POTENTIAL 10-15 kg

These cows belong to the Prakasam district of Andhra 

Pradesh. Ongole bulls were used to develop the Brahman 

breed in North America, Photo: NBAGR

Clearly, some focussed thinking on how to rejuvenate and maximise these indigenous breeds — with all their added advantages of lower maintenance cost and greater adaptability — would have stood India in great stead. But shockingly, even after five decades of promoting exotic semen and expensive imported crossbreeds, government institutes have no comparative data on the maintenance cost of different breeds. It is only in 2012 that the central ministry of animal husbandry finally commissioned a two-year project to NDRI, Karnal, to develop methodologies for estimating the cost of milk production.

This is a step that should have been taken urgently several decades ago. The sheer fatality of exclusively promoting exotic cattle over desi cattle would have become evident much earlier. The story of Ammo, a small dairy farmer in the Gautam Budh Nagar district of Uttar Pradesh, is profoundly telling. Ammo recently lost two exotic crossbreds that had cost her a staggering Rs 70,000 each, to foot and mouth disease after spending Rs 5,000 on their treatment. Close to her house stood tethered another “American cow” bought for just Rs 7,000. “The previous owner did not get any milk from it. I hope a local bull will perform some miracle,” says Ammo’s neighbour Sheesh Pal, explaining why he’d bought the cow.

The story of Ammo and Sheesh Pal succinctly captures the short-termism of investing in expensive crossbreeds. But the costliness of these cows or their vulnerability to disease is only one part of the picture. The argument for crossbreeds over desi cows is always presented through data skewed in other ways.

It is true that, maintained well, crossbreeds often produce milk in excess of 30 kg per day. But as their average yield in India is stuck at 6.63 kg, it’s clear that the majority of this cattle, in the care of resource-strapped farmers, is not delivering to potential. In such a scenario, quality desi cows with an average yield of 8-20 kg would be a far more lucrative option. Again, it’s true exotic crossbreeds can produce 4,500 kg per annual lactation. Desi cows, on the other hand, rarely cross 2,500 kg per lactation in standard home conditions. But, crossbreeds rarely lactate more than four times; while desis lactate 10-12 times. In effect, this means a crossbreed can only produce 18,000 kg of milk in a lifetime, while a desi can give up to 25-30,000 kg.

Unfortunately, thanks to government policy, such robust desi cows are hardly available any longer. We are witnessing the end of the Indian cow.

Such is the callousness, even a reliable breed-wise census has never been conducted in India, says Sosamma Iype, who taught at Kerala Agricultural University and revived India’s “zero-maintenance” Vechur breed, the smallest milch cattle in the world. Despite this shocking absence of official data, every piece of anecdotal evidence suggests that, except for the Gir, indigenous milch breeds in India have become extremely vulnerable.

In Uttar Pradesh, for example, there are 1.8 million exotic cows and 1.4 million desis. More than a million of these pure desis are made up of the local Hariana cattle. But, inexplicably, the state also counts some 1.51 lakh Sahiwals, a top milch breed from Punjab, and 75,000 Tharparkars, the hardy desert milcher of Rajasthan.

A district veterinary officer in western UP dismisses these figures as hallucinatory. “We do have some Sahiwals — but one and a half lakh?! And if you find me a Tharparkar here, I will felicitate the owner at my own expense,” he guffaws.

While a number of prime desi breeds such as the Red Sindhi, Sahiwal and Tharparkar are facing extinction in India today, not one exotic crossbred has been able to take their place. There is no answer from the NDRI on the field performance of Karan Fries and Karan Swiss breeds. The silence over the success of Sunandini being developed since 1965, the Friesian-Sahiwal or Sindhi-Jersey cattle is equally intriguing.

“In general, crossbreeding has not been successful,” says Dr Iype. “No exotic crossbred has stabilised till now. As long as import and use of pure exotic bulls continues, no stabilisation can be expected.”

THINGS NEED not have gone so badly wrong. Back in 1965, when an expert group was asked to formulate a cattle-breeding policy, they came up with a scientifically robust, multi-pronged approach: selective breeding of quality indigenous cows in their breeding tracts; using these improved breeds to upgrade the non-descript stock; and the use of exotic semen to upgrade non-descript cattle into exotic crossbreeds only near urban centres where dairy owners could afford to support such high-maintenance herds.

The policy was firmly against introducing exotic semen in the breeding tracts of indigenous milch breeds. So were our dairy farmers. When the NDDB was launched under Verghese Kurien, the proud Gir herders of Gujarat resisted the exotic cattle for years. One story has it that a group of local dairy farmers contemptuously dragged a few exotic crossbreeds to Kurien’s house on the day of his daughter’s marriage to give away in dowry.

But once artificial insemination became popular, the floodgates were thrown open. Like almost everything in India, the looming milk crisis is the result of a colossal planning mess.

According to Gujarat government data from Rajkot district for 2002-05, for instance, the high yield Gir was callously edged out by exotic crossbreeds in its own core breeding tract: 62,095 Gir semen straws were produced for artificial insemination in those three years. The number for exotic crossbreeds was more than double at 1,63,435.

There were many warning signs from the beginning, but unfortunately, few took heed of them. In the 1980s, a herd of Holstein Friesians capable of 8,000-kg per lactation was bought from Israel. But once they landed in Bengaluru, the animals refused to eat. So their feed too had to be imported from Israel. When the cows were finally milked, the yield was a sad 2,200 kg. Same was the story with Danish Jerseys brought around the same time to Koraput in Odisha.

“Yet,” says a retired bureaucrat, who was part of the Operation Flood team, “policy-makers trained in the West persisted with their love of European breeds. Frequent foreign sojourns to procure cattle kept the babus happy. We wanted to emulate Israel’s success story without imbibing the Israelis’ rigour. India is a vast country; we could have singled out one district for a disciplined experiment. But we did not bother.”

The country will have to pay a high price for that callousness. The practice of cross breeding ought to be very exact and carefully monitored. But unlike Israel, no records of herds and their mating patterns have been maintained in India. So, though the first generation of exotic crossbreeds showed encouraging results, as they were randomly mated, the whole thing began to backfire.

Two years ago, the NDDB finally developed its own software — Information Network for Animal Productivity and Health (INAPH) — to maintain live field data on pedigrees and the selection of the right bulls for breeding. So far, around 12 lakh animals have been registered in eight states. This, of course, is a very small percentage of India’s cattle. And the programme’s field success is yet to be established.

Holstein Friesian

AVERAGE YIELD 9-10 kg | POTENTIAL 30-40 kg

The large animals with black and white markings originated in 

northern Holland and Friesland. Known for its high milk yield, 

it has become the mainstay of the global dairy industry and 

outnumbers all other breeds in the US, Photo: Ankit Agarwal

But proof of indiscretions lies everywhere. The 11th Five-Year Plan set a target to produce a mind-boggling 40 million doses of semen every year. Less than one-fifth of the lot was indigenous. The focus on quantity also compromised the semen’s sanitary, biological and genetic quality. The overwhelming emphasis on exotic strains also lowered the conception rate. A NABARD report for Andhra Pradesh, Haryana, Uttarakhand and Madhya Pradesh, quoted in the 11th Plan, put India’s overall cattle conception rate at 35 percent: the international standard is 50 percent.

A high level of inbreeding due to the massive global use of Holstein- Friesian semen from an original population of less than 100 breeding bulls has weakened the gene further. Tropical conditions make conception even more difficult and increases embryo deaths.

In 2011, an article in Farmers’ Forum by Dr OP Dhanda and Dr KML Pathak cautioned that crossbreeding had led to “higher incidences of reproductive disorders like anoestrous and repeat breeding, poor libido and lower freezability of semen… leading to a very high culling rate in bulls”.

These are not alarmist voices. Dr Dhanda was the assistant director general (animal science) at the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). Dr Pathak is the serving deputy director general at ICAR.

There are other factors that make crossbreeds unfeasible in India. An average exotic crossbreed, says Dr Sagari Ramdas, a veterinarian and director of NGO Anthra at Hyderabad, requires at least four times the water a local breed does. “In Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh, for example, water is being literally mined to keep the exotic crossbreeds in business.”

Karan Swiss

AVERAGE YIELD 4-8 kg | POTENTIAL 25-30 kg

Work on the Karan Swiss started in 1963 at the NDRI, Karnal, 

using Sahiwal or Red Sindhis with Brown Swiss. In 1971, the 

institute started trying to cross Holstein Friesian, Brown Swiss 

and Jersey with Tharparkar before settling with HF to develop 

the Karan Fries. Neither has fully stabilised in the field. 

Photo: Ankit Agarwal

THE THREAT of extinction is not an empty one. India’s rush for exotic semen has had other major fallouts: there are few quality desi bulls left for natural mating. If a climatic upheaval or epidemic trips India’s already tottering exotic crossbreeds in the future, only infusion of indigenous genes can save the day. But, most of our pure desi breeds are likely to disappear within this decade.

This shift to exotic blood has not only damaged the domestic milk cows but also the draught breeds. The Ninth Plan had underlined the importance of animal carts for their huge employment potential in the rural economy. But many states such as Kerala have almost wiped off their sturdy draught breeds.

The fate of exotic crossbreed bulls is even worse. Vulnerable to Indian weather conditions, they are useless as draught animals. Unless they are selected as breeders, these bulls are either killed immediately after birth or starved to death. Those who escape join the long, brutal march to slaughterhouses both In India and abroad as illegal consignments. The Indian beef trade is worth 6,000-10,000 crore a year. Many believe the ineffective ban on cow slaughter has only ended up creating a revenue loss to the State and magnifying the unthinkable cruelty these animals face in transit. But even to suggest lifting the ban is anathema. India’s holy cows must be kept safe. At least on paper.

Random Crossbred

AVERAGE YIELD 0 kg | POTENTIAL Uncertain

A dry ‘American cow’ bought for Rs 7,000 by Sheesh Pal, a 

dairy farmer in Uttar Pradesh. It was a gamble: the owner was
banking on some local bull performing a miracle to make it yield milk,
Photo: Jay Mazoomdaar

WHEN VERGHESE Kurien set up Amul, he did not envision mass production of milk but “milk production by the masses”. “But the trend is moving towards industrialisation of dairying and this will eventually force the rural poor and small players out of business,” warns Dr Iype. The Tamil Nadu government distributed 12,000 Jersey and HF crossbreeds among the poor during 2011-12. Once the lactation cycle is done, what will the poor do with these white elephants tethered to their backyards?

“Our state policies are pushing us in a suicidal direction,” says Dr Ramdas. “Two companies have already taken control of the genetics of broiler poultry all over the world — from Brazil to Malaysia, including India. If we allow this to happen in agriculture and dairy, the sovereignty of our farmers will be at stake.”

A dramatic turnaround is still possible. A timely policy shift and public investment in local breeds can revive our precious bio-diversity in 25-35 years — which amounts to four to five cattle generations. “We still have the local breeds, frozen semen and the knowledge owned by farmers,” Ramdas continues. “But once lost and diluted, knowledge and breeds takes generations to revive.”

Unfortunately, though we can still turn things around, the signs are not encouraging. Free Trade Agreements with and duty exemptions to the European Union, Australia and New Zealand are likely to flood our markets with subsidised dairy products. While dairy processors in India will welcome cheap skimmed milk and butter fat and convert these into milk, the already struggling small dairy farmers may not be able to cope with the still lower procurement price.

Indian industry, of course, already has its strategies in place. As a former Amul executive explains: “Indian brands will always be competitive thanks to low cost inputs such as labour. Farmers who can’t maintain exotic crossbreds can be absorbed as farm hands in large dairies. For rural consumers who cannot afford milk cartons, we will introduce small sachets good enough for whitening a few cups of tea.”

In the emerging order, it seems that is all the traditional keepers of the Kamadhenu apparently deserve. And that is all they will get.

Size Matters

Photo: Courtesy Vechur Conservation Trust

The tiny Vechur is the world’s smallest cattle breed. No taller than 90 cm, this native of Kerala daily produces 2.5-3.5 kg of milk, which has a high fat content of 5-8 percent. Its low feed requirement and resilience to diseases have earned it the fame of ‘zero-maintenance’ cow.

Under the Livestock Improvement Act of 1961, any licencing officer in Kerala could order castration of bulls of indigenous species and a farmer had to comply within 30 days. The practice took its toll on local breeds, including the Vechur, which by 2000 figured on the FAO’s Critical-maintained Breeds List (to qualify, the number of breeding females has to be less than 100 or the number of breeding males less than five, or the overall count less than 120).

Dr Sosamma Iype, then a professor at the Kerala Agricultural University, started looking for Vechur cattle in 1988 to save the breed from extinction. With the help of a group of students under the leadership of Anil Zachariah, she founded the Vechur Conservation Trust (later Association) in 1998. Today, the Vechur is a highly sought after breed in Kerala and commands a price of  Rs 1 lakh and above.

A1 versus A2

Milk of European breeds is addictive, triggers schizophrenia,diabetes and cardiovascular diseases

In July 2007, Dr Keith Woodford, a professor of farmmanagement at New Zealand’s Lincoln Universitypublished a paper titled A2 Milk, Farmer Decisions, and Risk Management that reported how “approximately 500 New Zealand dairy farmers are converting their herds to eliminate production of A1 beta-casein within the milk” responsible for “Type 1 diabetes, heart disease and autism”.

Dr Woodford went on to explain: “The alternative (to A1) is A2 beta-casein, and the associated milk is known as A2 milk. Originally all cow milk was of the A2 type. However, a genetic mutation, probably between 5000 and 10,000 years ago, has resulted in a proportion ofcows of European breeds producing a casein variant called A1 beta-casein. A1 beta-casein is absent in the milk of pure Asian and African cattle.”

He offered “eight strands to the evidence” to the ill-effects of A1 beta-casein: countries with high intakes of A1 beta-casein are the countries with high levels of Type 1 diabetes and heart disease; A1 and A2 beta-caseindigest differently and only A1 beta-casein releases beta-casomorphin7 (BCM7) which is a powerful opioid(addictive) and causes arterial plaque; rabbits fed A1 beta-casein develop considerably more plaque on their aorta and rats show higher incidence of Type 1 diabetes;evidence from American and European investigationsshow that autistic and schizophrenic persons typically excrete large quantities of BCM7 in their urine; and many who are intolerant to milk are able to drink A2 milk.

Dr Woodford was worried that most consumers and dairy farmers worldwide remained unaware of the issues surrounding A1 and A2 milk. Within four years, Indian scientists at the National Bureau of Animal Genetic Resources (NBAGR) came up with their own study. “The A2 allele gene in Indian milk breeds of cows and buffalos are 100 per cent, while in foreign breeds, it is around 60 per cent,” it said in 2011.

NBAGR screened the status of the A2 allele of the beta-casein gene in 22 indigenous breeds and the twodominant foreign breeds Holstein Friesian and Jersey. While the A2 allele was 100 per cent in the top five indigenous milch breeds –Red Sindhi, Sahiwal,Tharparkar, Gir and Rathi – and around 94 per cent in other indigenous dual and draught breeds, its status was merely 60 per cent in Holstein Friesian and Jersey.

According to Dr Woodford, the major consumer market for A2 milk is in Australia where it is available in some 800 supermarkets and 200 convenience stores.However, overall market share is probably less than 1% because of limited publicity. In an increasingly health conscious world, this creates a huge potential for global demand for the A2 milk of our indigenous breeds. For now, we must rethink our strategy of flooding the domestic markets with A1 milk by aggressively pushing exotic breeds at home and opening up the dairy sector toforeign brands.

From Sariska to Manas, how we squander second chances

Why translocate tigers and rhinos to die in forests that lost entire populations in the past if we have not learnt our lessons?

FirstPost, 20 January, 2013

Last week, a rhino was found dead in Assam’s Manas national park. It bore marks of 12 bullets from an AK-47. It was gunned down in apparently the best protected part of the park close to three anti-poaching camps. Its horn, nails and tail were missing. The rhino was not born in Manas. It was shifted here from Pobitora sanctuary in 2008 to give Manas a second chance.

Long before Rajasthan’s Sariska lost all its tigers to poachers in 2004, Manas in Assam witnessed the local extinction of the rhino. At the peak of Bodo militancy, the national park lost 75-odd rhinos between 1987 and 1996. When it was clear that not a single horn was spared, Manas lost its World Heritage Site status too.

Sariska got its second chance with the tiger soon after the wipeout. But Manas had to wait for over a decade for rhinos till a semblance of law and order and political stability returned to the Bodo areas. In 2005, Indian Rhino Vision 2020 – a programme to increase Assam’s rhino population from 2000 to 3000 by 2020 – was launched by the state government in partnership with the Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC), the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), the International Rhino Foundation (IRF) and the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

The first rhino to walk in Manas in 10 years was a rescued animal released by Centre of Wildlife Rehabilitation and Conservation in 2006. The first translocation took another two years when a rhino was shifted from Pobitora sanctuary in April 2008. Since then, Manas has received 18 translocated and six rescued rhinos from Kaziranga and Pobitora. It also regained the lost World Heritage Site tag.

A tiger was airlifted to Sariska barely two months after Manas received its first translocated rhino. Since June 2008, a total of eight Ranthambhore tigers have been moved in Sariska to build a new population. In November 2010, the first tiger that was translocated to Sariska was found dead. It was poached very close to a forest post. Poachers claimed the first translocated rhino in Manas in October 2011. The second poaching was reported in May last year, and the third last week.

If the authorities were in a hurry to create history at Sariska, the Manas rhino re-population programme had the support of the state, the BTC, two international organisations and a wing of the US government. After the second rhino poaching in Manas last year, an expert assessment report underlined the need for intensive patrolling, creation and maintenance of patrolling tracks, setting up an intelligence network, procurement of arms and communication equipment, checking unauthorised entries and regular coordination with local communities. But nothing moved on the ground.

Instead, the park authorities blame former Bodo militants for poaching and complain of police inaction in the face of protection provided by certain Bodo MLAs to their former comrades. But if the state forest authority and personnel were in the first place unable to perform their duties in Bodo areas, they should not have gone ahead with the translocation programme till they felt confident about protecting the animals.

WWF-India, a key partner of the IRV 2020 project, issued a strongly-worded statement after last week’s poaching, expressing concern “about the level of commitment of the Assam State Forest Department and the Bodoland Territorial Council in providing protection to the translocated rhinos in Manas”. It urged the state and the BTC to take exemplary action against the poachers and immediately enhance protection by ensuring effective, round-the-clock patrolling.

All rhinos are radio-collared during translocation and remotely monitored till the collars drop off. The rhino that was poached last week was being monitored till last month when it lost its collar. But lack of field patrolling by ground staff in Manas meant that the animal fell off the radar and its carcass could only be traced about a week after the poaching. Incidentally, the presence of a radio collar was of little use in Sariska when the stationary signal from the dead tiger escaped attention for three days in 2010.

However, lack of monitoring is not the only factor that is endangering the translocated animals. Even two years after the poaching, Sariska continues to have villages inside the reserve. Pilgrim traffic to the Hanuman temple deep inside the reserve still flows unregulated. Free entry and unrestricted vehicular movement makes forest roads a free-for-all every Tuesday and Saturday. There is no effective compensation scheme for livestock losses to mitigate conflict. Rationalisation of reserve boundaries has not taken place after repeated recommendations by expert groups appointed by the government.

Given the advancement in biological sciences, it is not really difficult to shift a few animals from one forest to another. Everyone involved with the IRV 2020 or the Sariska repopulation project knew that shunting animals was not half as challenging as securing their future would be. Sariska and Manas share a dark past. For conservation to triumph over that past, a few animals had to be put at risk. But why hurry the experiment before securing the forests? Why refuse to learn and change course when the experiment itself throws up early warnings?

Today, Sariska has a new tiger population of seven while Manas has 21 rhinos. Poaching has made a comeback at both places but there is good news as well. Last year, tiger cubs were finally spotted in Sariska and Manas had its first rhino calf. The wait for the second generation – the first benchmark of success of any new population — was over.

While the repopulation process will continue, let us be candid about what we owe these majestic animals that are powerless before our grand designs. When we squander the second chance to reclaim our forests, it means more than the loss of our intent. It costs the translocated animals their lives.

The Green clearance circus

It’s practical, though, to do away with gram sabha’s consent for linear projects

Tehelka, 17 January, 2013

THE INTERVENTION of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to end the stand-off between the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) and the National Highways Authority of India failed to resolve the fundamental ambiguities of our green clearance process. While it did away with the impractical requirement of obtaining the prior approval of gram sabhas for roads or power lines, the move to delink green clearances — environment from forest — will only allow projects to be cleared as fait accompli.

Not all guidelines issued by the MoEF are legally sound. When former environment minister Jairam Ramesh made prior approval of gram sabhas mandatory for project clearance in July-August 2009, he probably overlooked the limitations of the Forest Rights Act (FRA). No right, including the fundamental ones, is absolute. Even after recognition, forest rights are not above public or national interest. But there is no mechanism in the Act to deal with such scenarios that are open to manipulation.

So when conservationists demand that the FRA be bypassed in the interest of wildlife in critical areas, we cannot deny the project proponents the same bandwidth. But the real problem with gram sabha approval for linear projects is that roads and powerlines pass through hundreds of villages but individual opinion of each can decide their fate. However, the new idea of seeking state-level approvals, as suggested by the PMO, may not adequately address local concerns. Instead, we need public consultations at the district level.

On the other hand, the very idea of delinking green clearances is absurd. A linear project needs environment clearance for its entire length and forest (and wildlife) clearance only for the stretches that pass through forested (and notified wildlife) areas. Right now, no work can begin till both clearances are in place because the pressure on the ministry to issue forest clearance becomes enormous once a project invests huge amounts in its non-forest segments.

While environment clearance is granted by either state or Central authorities, depending on the project, both the state and Centre decide on a forest clearance. So, even projects that do not go to the Centre for environment clearances require a Central nod for forest clearances. Delinking the two compromises these checks and balances. It also sends the wrong signal that every consideration — from political to financial — can supersede ecological concerns while conceiving a project.

But green clearances should not be taken for granted. If a project resists an alternative alignment beneficial to forests and wildlife just because it will escalate costs, it cannot complain that delay in clearances is having the same effect. And there are areas — India’s few remaining natural systems — where no creation or expansion of linear or other projects can be allowed because none is needed. Otherwise, the state can junk the pretension of having green laws and environmental concerns.

The stand-off between growth and green is necessary because no interest should override the other. But a balance can be struck only if India moves towards a singlewindow, time-bound mechanism for all green clearances.

There are several ecological concerns — environment, forest, wildlife, rivers, groundwater, wasteland, marine, etc — and each is defined under different and multiple laws. To cut the clutter, we need a nodal green authority that can tell a project proponent, once the required data is furnished and fees for inspections paid, if a project is feasible or the modifications it may require. Once a final proposal is submitted, a single green clearance should be issued or denied within 3-6 months.

For that to happen, we need to know what we have where on ground, decide our priorities and streamline the laws. In spite of setting up Land Use Boards in every state during the 1970s and ’80s, India still does not have a national land use policy. The PMO could begin there.

Why we must clear the GMO clutter while we still can

Pushed by the government and riding on hired science, the GM industry is slowly but surely descending on us. But we must demand answers to a few reasonable questions.

FirstPost, 13 January, 2013

Once the government enacts the National Biotechnology Regulatory Bill, 2009, articles like this may not get published anymore. Before I go on to why, let me admit that stark polarisation has always been the hallmark of any GMO (genetically modified organism) debate. I woke up to one this morning. Readers’ responses to my last article also reinforced the fact.

Yet, it is still possible to seek answers to a few very reasonable questions. The first question one needs to ask is if we need GM crop at all. And if we do, is it safe for our health; and finally, if it makes economic sense.

There is no debate over the fact that there is enough food on earth to feed every adult and child and hunger is a problem, as Dr Amartya Sen put it, of entitlement. But as population grows, so does the demand for food. What should be then the global strategy to meet that challenge?

India was among the 58 countries that ratified in April 2008 the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) report by the UN and World Bank. It said that the secret of food security lay in ‘back to basics’ agriculture and local solutions which needed investment, research and policy thrust to develop and promote conventional technologies for restocking groundwater, revitalising soil, multi-cropping etc.

On biotechnology, the IAASTD report said that “there is a significant lack of transparent communication… information can be anecdotal and contradictory, and uncertainty on benefits and harms is unavoidable. There is a wide range of perspectives on the environmental, human health and economic risks and benefits of modern biotechnology; many of these risks are as yet unknown.” The three countries that did not agree were the US, Canada and Australia.

But is GMO really more effective than other technologies in increasing yield? Between 1950 and 1980, the same report says, prior to the development of GMOs, modern varieties of wheat increased yields up to 33 percent even in the absence of fertilizers. “Modern biotechnologies used in containment have been widely adopted. For example, the industrial enzyme market reached $1.5 billion in 2000. But the application outside containment, such as the use of GM crops, is much more contentious as some varieties indicate highly variable 10-33 percent yield gains in some places and yield declines in others.”

In India, Bt-cotton has increased overall productivity. But it helps the crop fight only pests. In Vidarbha, the crop failed due to water shortage. In Punjab, it caused widespread skin disease. Down south, cattle died foraging on Bt fields. It is possible that some Bt-seeds are safer than the others. But farmers have no comparative knowledge or option to choose.

Ultimately, agricultural productivity will depend on water availability, topsoil quality and farming practices. Green revolution emptied aquifers along vast tracts of north India. Deforestation and use of chemical agents spoiled the top soil. We do need technology to reduce water-dependence of crops. But can we trust the same chemical giants, who flooded our fields with pesticides before disowning it as a lethal practice after four decades, not to come up with another expensive chemical panacea that will again backfire on us?

So far, the GM crops boast traits designed to achieve three different purposes. Some resist herbicides so that weed-killers can be freely used. Others produce proteins not naturally present in them to kill pests like the Bt-toxin does. The third enables plants to fight drought.

The herbicide-resistant plants encourage spraying of deadly toxins such as Monsanto’s Roundup. The pesticide-resistant plants create super pests and have been a health hazard to humans and animals alike. While the so-called drought-resistant ones have bettered performance by 6 percent over 15 years — the minimum time required for developing and establishing a new strain — conventional methods achieved the same result over the same period at a fraction of the cost.

While there is enough to suggest that the GMO producers need the technology more than the world’s farmers and the hungry, are their products even safe for us? Frankly, there can be no simple answer because each GMO needs to be rigorously tested to get specific results. But who do we trust when science and the governments are equally compromised?

In the US, the safety regulators themselves are the industry bigwigs. The same industry funds the entire agricultural research in America. No wonder then that when India signed the pact with the US on strategic partnership in agriculture and food security in 2006, our Planning Commission included Monsanto, Walmart and Archer Midlands as board members of Indo-US Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture.

Dr S Parasuraman, director of Tata Institute of Social Sciences, was part of the first expert committee that evaluated Bt-brinjal. When he objected to the way Mahyco was being allowed to run away with the clearance, the panel was disbanded and he was dropped from the second committee. Of the 16 members of the new panel, only five did not have any conflict of interest.

In July 2009, then Minister of State in the prime minister’s office Prithviraj Chavan wrote to then Health minister Dr Anbumani Ramadoss, allaying his apprehensions about the potential health impact of GM food. In that letter, Chavan quoted extensively and verbatim from promotional materials of the industry, including the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Applications, a quasi-scientific body funded by Monsanto.

After reports of livestock death due to foraging on Bt fields became regular in Andhra Pradesh, the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) in January 2008 cited reports from the Indian Veterinary Research Institute (IVRI) to claim “conclusive proof of safety” to animals from Bt cotton feed. Replying to a subsequent RTI, the IVRI said that they did no such study and did not submit any report to the GEAC either.

No wonder this GEAC cleared Bt-brinjal entirely on the basis of the data provided by Mahyco without a single independent trial even after Dr PM Bhargava, microbiologist and Supreme Court-appointed observer to the GEAC, pointed out 29 anomalies in the bio-safety dossier submitted by the company.

Against the odds of lack of funding and access, whatever little independent science tells us has been extremely worrying. A group of researchers have established in February 2012 that the Bt-toxin kills human kidney cells. Since Bt-toxins are not inert on non-target human cells, conclusive medical evidence is required before ruling out their role in a range of diseases from intestinal permeability to cancer.

Another paper published in March 2012 in the journal Toxicol In Vitro found that Roundup, a glyphosate-based herbicide being used increasingly on genetically modified plants, induces necrosis and apoptosis in mature rat testicular cells and testosterone decreases at lower levels.

A second study at France’s Caen University found that Monsanto’s Roundup and a GM crop resistant to it caused, at levels approved by the US government, massive tumours, liver and kidney damage, leading to premature death of 50 percent of the male and 70 percent of the female lab rats used for the experiment.

The Telegraph in UK quoted Dr Michael Antoniou of King’s College London, who contributed to the project, as saying, “This is the most thorough research ever published into the health effects of GM food crops and the herbicide Roundup on rats. It shows an extraordinary number of tumours developing earlier and more aggressively – particularly in female animals.”

But would not the impact of GM food show on Americans who have been consuming it since 1994? Again, there is very little research to link the health patterns to consumption of specific food items. But the general trend reveals an ominous pattern. The US is placed 28th in life expectancy. An American spends an average $8000 on healthcare every year. Since 1990, despite a sharp fall in smoking, life expectancy in America has increased by a mere 2.2 years to 77.6 years, the lowest among industrialised countries.

While many blame obesity, lifestyle diseases and a faulty healthcare system, these two decades are also the period when GMO became an integral part of the American diet. Since 1990, global child mortality has fallen by one-third. With a 42 percent improvement – from 11.6 to 6.7 per 1000 — in 20 years, the US ranks 42nd, behind even Cuba. Children are the most vulnerable to toxins in food.

What further stokes fear is the industry’s rigid resistance to labelling. Forget issues of consumer rights and choice, why shouldn’t GM food be promoted with the GM brand? Increased cost is a lame excuse. In her August 2012 paper, Dr Joanna M. Shepherd-Bailey of Emory University School of Law pointed out that, in the worst case scenario, prices for packaged products would only have to increase by, on average, 0.03 percent to offset the entire onetime expense of redesigning labels. Similarly, produce prices would have to increase by only 0.1 percent to account for the new expense of placards disclosing genetic engineering.

After companies like Monsanto and Hershey contributed $44 million for the campaign “No on Prop 37” targeted against proponents who could raise only $7.3 million, the mandatory GMO labelling bill was narrowly (53-47) defeated in California this November. It is anyone’s guess why $44 million had to be spent on an intensive anti-regulation campaign to save a few cents on food labelling. But the pressure on the governments to make GMO come clean is mounting: two more American states – Washington and New Mexico – moved legislations for labelling earlier this month.

In the largely unorganised India market, rigorous labeling of GM food will be impossible. The farmer will have to buy GM seed every year as he is legally forbidden to recycle any. With “patent-protected” food crops, the control of the massive agricultural sector will eventually be in the hands of Ag-Biotech (Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer CropScience, and Dow). That is the economic implication of the GM takeover.

The 2008 IAASTD report warned in no uncertain terms against such a global scenario: “There is particular concern about present IPR instruments eventually inhibiting seed-saving, exchange, sale and access to proprietary materials necessary for the independent research community to conduct analyses and long term experimentation on impacts. GM farmers may become liable for adventitious presence if it causes loss of market certification and income to neighbouring organic farmers, and conventional farmers may become liable to GM seed producers if transgenes are detected in their crops.”

Fortunately, we can still raise these issues and ask questions of GMO as long as the National Biotechnology Regulatory Bill, 2009, does not become law and throws in jail anyone who “without evidence or scientific record misleads the public about safety of GM crops”. But the clock is ticking.

The National Tiger Consolation Authority

Five years later, the NTCA has changed little on the ground or in the mind

Tehelka, 11 January, 2013

ON 4 FEBRUARY 2005, two weeks after I reported the local extinction of tigers in Sariska, Project Tiger (PT) chief Rajesh Gopal told the Hindustan Times that a tiger was spotted and tracked by a team from the Wildlife Institute of India (WII) in Sariska. On 7 February, he told The Times of India that reports on missing tigers were “baseless, false and intended to malign the government”. On 29 March, the CBI confirmed the Sariska wipeout.

Less than four years later, in an interview to TOI on 4 December 2008, Gopal took a different line: “Sariska was tragic but it gave us an opportunity to bring about changes. The PM’s office was directly involved, the Wildlife Crime Control Bureau was set up, a scientific tiger estimation method was evolved… While the media highlighted our deficiencies, it also brought about awareness in the common man, in the system.”

But all did not end well for the tiger. The 2006 amendment of the Wildlife (Protection) Act (WLPA), 1972, led to the formation of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) to give more teeth to the PT, which had merely been a fund-disbursing agency. Gopal, director of the PT since 2002, became the first member-secretary of the NTCA in 2006. He still is. Not much has changed since, not on the ground, not in the mind.

Under Section 38 of the amended WLPA, the NTCA can “issue directions in writing to any person, officer or authority for the protection of tiger or tiger reserves and such person, officer or authority shall be bound to comply with the directions”. Various states and agencies have repeatedly ignored the copious letters the NTCA routinely writes, but not a single official has ever been pulled up.

The federal structure of governance does make the NTCA’s job unenviable as forests and wildlife are on the Concurrent List. When the reality of Sariska sunk in, Gopal famously excused himself saying that he was not the “DFO of India”. While divisional forest officers (DFOs) remained responsible for management in their reserves, the formation of a statutory authority was meant to ensure checks and balances. It did not.

The NTCA defended Rajasthan when the state flouted its instruction to ensure genetic compatibility of tigers to be translocated to Sariska. It failed to free the Kosi corridor, defend the integrity of the Corbett tiger reserve and relocate willing Gujjars out of the park because a state forest official refused to stop “plantation work” on the land where the families were to be resettled. It let the railways ministry go scot-free when trains ran over jumbos inside tiger reserves.

Few states take the NTCA seriously. Some openly renounced its tiger census results in 2011. It could not rein in state forest bosses for flouting its instructions on declaring man-eaters. It failed to stall an ill-conceived move by the Karnataka government that declared BRT a tiger reserve (the same state threw away NTCA’s in-principle approval for Kudremukh as a tiger reserve). The list is long.

In 2009, the NTCA set up a committee to study a crisis-ridden Simlipal in Odisha and suggest ways forward. The report gathered dust till a spate of poachings forced it to form another panel in 2010, which reiterated the recommendations. The NTCA set up a committee with the state wildlife boss at its helm, and seasoned conservationists and senior cops who successfully tackled wildlife crime as members, to monitor the firefighting measures for six months.

“The state simply did not allow the monitoring committee to function while the NTCA watched helplessly. The result is continued poaching in Simlipal where elephants alone have suffered more than a dozen casualties since,” says Biswajit Mohanty, a member of the committee and the National Board for Wildlife. Much of Simlipal still remains outside the department’s effective control.

TO ENSURE “greater coordination between the forest and civil administrations”, the first Simlipal committee recommended in 2009 that “a serious knowledgebased effort, with professional support from technically competent agencies… should guide the identification of candidate villages for relocation” with “locally appropriate strategies”. Since the NTCA spends hundreds of crores on the scheme, this approach was appropriate for the entire country to make voluntary relocations fair and speedy.

Instead, the NTCA banked on state forest staff and constituted several review panels. “Our report on the village relocation process was not made public and then there was another review by a different panel. Frequent monitoring helps only if follow-up action is taken. Otherwise the money is wasted on numerous evaluations mostly by retired forest officials and conservationists who rarely speak out of line,” points out a biologist who served on many such committees.

But transparency has never been the NTCA’s strong point. “Overtly dependent on the convenient sarkari science of the WII, the NTCA even resisted scientific scrutiny of its methods of extrapolating field data,” said a former WII researcher associated with the 2011 census, adding that the estimation process may gain more credibility in its Phase IV as private institutes have been made partners.

Ironically, pumping huge funds for village resettlement and this new estimation method are the two major achievements the NTCA flaunted in its recent report. But there are other parameters of NTCA’s own to measure its success.

In 2005, the PT did its first Management Effectiveness Evaluation (MEE) in 28 tiger reserves. Five years on, the second evaluation showed that the number of ‘poor’ reserves remained constant at seven. Of the rest, the ‘very good’ and ‘good’ categories increased by 4 percent and 3 percent, respectively, and the ‘satisfactory’ decreased by 7 percent.

If that appears like some improvement, consider the absurdity of such evaluation. In 2005, Panna was rated ‘very good’ when tigers were at the brink of local extinction there. The severely compromised Simlipal was also in the top category. Buxa, another potentially zero-tiger reserve saved by floaters walking in from Bhutan, was labelled ‘good’. Remember, this was after Sariska.

In 2010, one expected the NTCA to be realistic. But even the second MEE rated Buxa as ‘good’. It found Simlipal in a ‘satisfactory’ condition when the NTCA’s own panels were struggling to save the reserve. Of the 30 parameters that the MEE uses, the strongest point of our reserves is apparently protection strategy and assessment of threats. Yet, poaching numbers scale new highs every year.

The MEE identified the weakest points as inadequacy of trained manpower and deployment, tiger conservation plan, habitat management and village relocation planning, lack of stakeholder participation and livelihood support to local communities. Yet, overall, 70 percent of our tiger reserves are apparently in ‘very good’ or ‘good’ conditions.

To be fair, the NTCA’s special status has withstood the pro-industry thrust of our governance in recent years. “It has also framed a few sound protocols — translocation or conflict-management manuals, for example — but few states are responsible enough to implement those. The NTCA rarely takes a stand. It’s been inconsistent even before the court of law,” rues a veteran conservationist. Others venture some explanation.

“The average age of the NTCA’s independent members is over 65 and their role is ceremonial. But the member-secretary is junior (in the IFS cadre) to most state forest chiefs who treat him like one. Also, a lot has happened during Gopal’s decade-long tenure. How can he fix accountability if he himself has never been accountable?” asks a former member of the PT standing committee.

In its report, the NTCA claimed notification of a number of new tiger reserves as its biggest achievement. But will the credit for bringing more area — about 8,000 sq km — under the NTCA’s watch compensate for the ignominy of losing tigers from at least 21,000 sq km of its former habitat in India since 2006-07 when the NTCA was formed?

The PM breaks silence: It’s GM food for thought

The PM wants enlightened debate to decide on the complex issue of GM crop to boost agricultural yield. But neither independent science nor simple economics supports his faith in a transgenic miracle.

FirstPost, 8 January, 2013

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is a man of silence and science. So the only time he granted an interview (read broke his silence) to a publication, he chose Science. Last February, he told the magazine that “NGOs, often funded from the United States and the Scandinavian countries, which are not fully appreciative of the development challenges that our country faces” were responsible for controversies that did not let him “makeuse of genetic engineering technologies to increase the productivity of ouragriculture”.

The PM was referring to the indefinite moratorium imposed on commercial planting of Bt brinjal in 2009 by then Environment minister Jairam Ramesh who found no over-riding urgency or adequate scientific consensus for the experiment. After that interview, Ramesh did not react if his boss was accusing him of sabotaging science or India’s food security but went on record saying that his “decision was not influenced by the campaign of any NGO, either from India or abroad”.

Six months on, in August 2012, the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture placed its report -- Cultivation of GeneticallyModified Food Crops: Prospects and Effects -- in the House. It revealed that a number of government agencies such as Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, Centre for Scientific and Industrial Research, National Biodiversity Authority, Department of Consumer Affairs, Department of Commerce and the Food Safety Standards Authority of India objected to transgenic food.

Yet, speaking at the 100^th Indian Science Congress in Kolkata last week, the PM was back at his scientific best. “Complex issues, be they genetically modified food or nuclear energy or exploration of outer space, cannot be settled by faith, emotion and fear but by structured debate, analysis and enlightenment,” he said in his address.

Strangely, he resented it last time when there were public hearings on Bt brinjal. For years, his government has been dodging pleas for open discussion on nuclear power by several organisations, some of which he dismissed as foreign-fundedlast year. Now, in one bold stroke, he dubbed all opposition to GMO (genetically modified organism), including those from various departments and technocrats of the government, as unscientific.

The science of GM food may be complex but the issue of its acceptance is not. Generating transgenic food is not grafting the stems of two plants to get a darker shade of red. It is about firing a plasmid or small DNA with a particle gun into cells and an inserted DNA integrating into a chromosome. It involves a million mutations which are totally unpredictable. The result is alien gene structures that never existed in nature. The default response of human or animal immune system is to attack the unknown. The GM food triggers the same reaction inside us.

The result is inflammation of the bowel which causes a range of disorders, from allergy and autism to cancer. Worse, transgenic food such as Bt corn or brinjal is modified with a soil bacteria -- Bacillus thuringiensis -- so that it produces toxins to kill insects. We are assured that the inbuilt pesticide harms only insects and not us. Irrespective of the veracity of the assurance -- it was debunked last February around the same time the PM was talking to Science -- would anyone want to swallow that as food? One would, the argument goes, if famished.

The advocates of GM food claim that the technology increases yield and will help feed a billion mouths. There is no conclusive data yet that transgenic food increases yield or deters weed. More importantly, the World Food Programme says that “there is enough food in the world today for everyone”. Yet, there is and will be hunger as long as millions cannot afford their share of food due to artificial market conditions.

It perhaps makes sense that the same market wants to profit more by peddling unnatural food in the name of addressing the artificial hunger it has created. If only the term unnatural was enough to describe the madness and potential threat of transgenic food and non-food organism or those who are promoting it.

In 1992, US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) decided without any safety studies that GM food would be treated like any other food. Six years on, it took a lawsuit to reveal thousands of internal communications among FDA scientists who demanded long-term trials but were muffled under the watch of Michael R Taylor, administrator of the Food Safety & Inspection Service and an old Monsanto hand who later returned to the company as vice-president (public policy). Today, Taylor serves as the FDA’s deputy commissioner.

Taylor is not alone. US secretaries for Agriculture Ann Veneman (2001) served on Monsanto’s board of directors. The present secretary, Thomas Vilsack, was felicitated as Governor of the Year 2001 by the Biotechnology Industry Organisation. Former deputy administrator of US Environmental Protection Agency Linda Fisher was a Monsanto vice-president and now serves DuPont, another chemical giant. That is how thin the thin line between the industry and the state has become.

 

While company-funded (or state-sponsored) scientific trials hastily clear GM products, every independent study faces roadblocks. “We don't have the complete picture. That's no accident,” explained Doug Gurian-Sherman of the Union of Concerned Scientists in Washington, “Multibillion-dollar agricultural corporations, including Monsanto and Syngenta, have restricted independent research on their genetically engineered crops. They have often refused to provide independent scientists with seeds, or they've set restrictive conditions that severely limit research options.”

Nevertheless, researchers established last February that the Bt toxin kills kidney cells, leading to what is informally called leaky guts, now an alarmingly common condition in children in the USA and Canada. The result is premature release of food in the bloodstream which immediately activates antibodies and triggers food intolerance and severe allergy. Over time, this can lead to a range of diseases from Parkinson’s to Alzheimer’s.

Other studies linked transgenic food to infertility, defective childbirth, abnormal DNA function and even a pathogen new to science. These are not matters of faith, emotion or fear. But no authority – MNCs, USFDA or scientific agencies of the Indian government – has settled any of these issues in public or allowed independent science to take a call.

Corporate-cum-state funding is an article of faith for agricultural research the world over. The industry donated millions to top universities and researchers have paid dearly for criticising GMO. Renowned Hungarian-born biochemist Arpad Pusztai was sacked by Scotland’s Rowett Institute when his 1998 study found that GM potato had negative effects on the stomach lining and immunity system of rat labs. Last year, Monsanto even bullied Vermont’s legislature to drop a bill that had the backing of over 90% of Connecticut residents and sought to make labelling of all GMO mandatory.

Yet, our PM wants to keep fear out of the transgenic discourse. He wants no emotion to be stirred even after thousands of suicides, loss of cotton crop (and livestock foraging on those Bt fields), skin infection of farmhands, a ban enforced by Maharashtra, and his agriculture minister Sharad Pawar telling Parliament last month that the objection to Bt cotton was “speculative, confusing and unscientific”.

But can we really debate the aspiration of biotech giants who want to eventually replace all natural farming with their GM seeds? Does the implication of two or three MNCs controlling the entire world’s food resources require analyses? Is there any enlightenment in risking a million unpredictable and uncontrollable mutations triggered by an infant technology just because we cannot stop profiteering in and wasting the food produced nature’s way?

No woman will ever feel safe if another does not

If we really seek change, let us stop lying about ourselves. When it comes to gender, there cannot be any hierarchy of safety or sensitivity.

FirstPost, 31 December, 2012

I did not wish to write this. I did not wish to write anything at all. Since waking up to the morning bulletin on Saturday, all I wanted to say was sorry, all over again. It did not come out. Until Saturday, her life was our only fig leaf. Then, there was nowhere to hide. No apology or anger or analysis to make us feel less miserable.

Today, we are left again to our fickle resolve. The protests, by the outraged and the opportunist, will continue till we move on. And move on we will because there can be no logical conclusion or closure to this. The rapists will be punished. But even if all our demands — a special session, stricter laws, fast-track courts, more cops on the road for commoners — are met, our lot will not change.

If it is change that we really seek, if we are serious that women should feel safer, we cannot lie about ourselves anymore. I write this today because it is time to face the truth and I do not care if this hurts sentiments.

Until Saturday, I did not care what a Sushma or a Jaya thinks because she so unabashedly refused to die. Far from the living dead cowering beneath some indelible scar, she insisted on seeing for herself if her friend was alright and pointedly asked if her assaulters were nabbed. Her inevitable end seemed impossible because, after everything, she told her mother she wanted to live.

Today, I ask the enlightened millions, who are scandalised by a Bengal MP’s puerile comment, if they even blinked when an agitated Sushma or a teary Jaya promptly murdered her spirit on the floor of the House? The TV anchors, who smarted all day at the Bengal MP’s audacity and made him apologize on air, did not bother to even question the other two.

Unlike junior Mukherjee who sneered at the protesters, the two women MPs demeaned the victim herself. Are the protesters more sensitive about their liberal selves than the dignity of those who survive rape? Or do we actually share the values that pity a rape victim as a jeevit laash? Is that why we demand blanket death penalty for rapists, knowing that they won’t think twice before murdering their victims (read witnesses) because they would get death anyway. Does the survival of living dead even matter to us?

Between the extremes of our reaction to Sushma or Jaya and Mukherjee, we are suitably outraged by another Bengal MP who dismisses a rape charge as negotiation gone wrong, a state Congress leader who professes evening curfew for women and a BJP MLA who wants to ban skirts at school. While most of us are stuck to our respective layers of regression, even the most vocal liberals refuse to see that these values are not aberrations that can be screamed away. We are people like us.

There is no other explanation for the moral, cultural or religious codes of conduct prescribed by so many in the last two weeks. Can we respect women in a system that does not respect anything but money and power or make them feel safer in a predominantly violent society where men are no lesser victims? Can love police on Valentine’s Day protect girls? Do Surpnakha’s, Sita’s or Draupadi’s stories give women hope? Even one of our most popular deities is worshipped in the phallic form because, according to Bhavisya Purana, he was cursed to that effect by the sage woman he raped.

The other end of this regressive spectrum is the neo-feminism that wants to legitimise commodification of woman as a right with total impunity. Over four decades, feminism has done a complete U-turn from burning advertisement hoardings that flaunted bikini-clad women to seeking right to expression in item numbers. Yes, these industries are run by mostly men. True, a woman walking naked is no justification for rape. But if we stereotype flesh as a rule in popular media, we have to account for some stereotypical male reaction too.

We have to accept that the default male behaviour in all advanced species is violent. Boys are mean; they fight. Some rapists are driven by sex. But women would be much safer if lust was the only impetus for rape. It is more of a power statement. Men rape women who ‘belong to’ other men. Men rape women as punishment. Men rape women because they can.

That is why most rapes happen within families. Strangers also rape and the startling majority of them belong to forces and militias. It has been going on in Kashmir, the North-East and along the red corridor from Bihar to Andhra Pradesh. Not only the armed forces, police and insurgents but feudal armies are also at it across the length and breadth of rural India.

Yet, our protest waited till she was brutalised in a Delhi bus on busy evening roads. Granted, the fact that something so brazen could happen in the Capital reflects the extent of lawlessness in the less governed parts of the country (and the protest likewise has pan-Indian ramification). Also, a late tipping point is better than no tipping point. If only our outrage could collectively rise above our selfish concerns.

Even the sincere mainstream of this protest is mostly concerned about the safety of the urban middle class. Forget those lakhs of victims raped and assaulted all across the hinterland, did we ever bother for the underclass in our big, bad cities? The domestic helps who routinely turn up battered; the vegetable venders who are forced to pay hafta in ways only women can; or the homeless who are picked up in the night by cops and ruffians alike? No, it took a middle class victim in a middleclass situation at a middleclass hour to shake us up.

There is nothing wrong in feeling scared when there is every reason to be afraid. But rape, or any gender issue, cannot be fought selectively. Women will never be safe if the physical and psychological safety net is supposed to cover one particular class better than the other. When we vent our anger against the VIPs, when we raise slogans that the only women safe in Delhi are Sonia and Sheila, we forget that millions of rural or poor Indian women may feel the same about their well-to-do city sisters.

When it comes to gender, there cannot be any hierarchy of safety or sensitivity. A stupid Mukherjee cannot be more outrageous than an impassioned Sushma. Accepting a shorter skirt cannot be liberal as long as the length remains an issue. Our religious tradition of female deities cannot help if it fosters inhuman demands of virtue. Sentencing Delhi bus rapists cannot bring her justice if a thousand others continue to walk free.

The mind that rapes only rarely possesses a rapist. But at all times, it keeps alive the possibility and feeds on every assault that goes unpunished anywhere. That is why no woman can ever really feel safe if another does not.