Providing Enough Grazing Grounds For Cows Is Real Gauraksha 

Mahesh Vijapurkar

Very recently, some 250 stray animals, including cows, were impounded in a local school in Uttar Pradesh’s Lakihmpur Kheri, driving out its rightful users: the children. Neither do the teachers nor the children know when the school would resume its rightful purpose. This was not a stray but fifth such incident in recent weeks in that state, part of what we call the cow belt.

We don’t need to ask why the farmers resorted to such a desperate measure, prioritizing locking away the bovines over teaching children. With the ban on slaughter of cows, the decrepit animals have no use for the owners which they would not want to feed. They are being left to wander, grazing on what they can get, including a farmer’s crop.

Farming, economists have told us time and again, is a precarious venture. And not all dairying is the animals-in- the-stall variety. Lot many farmers, especially the marginal and minor ones, have it only as a subsidiary occupation and leave them to subsist on the village commons to graze.

Grazing lands are not part of an agricultural eco system.

Free-wheeling grazing is more the norm. This in turn is leading to a situation where the milk-yielding bovine is competing with the feed that is being claimed by the decrepit animals. This is unsettling the entire system of cattle rearing and its economic benefits are being undermined.

Two considerations emerge from this situation. Where does the small land owner take his bovines, now to be respected at all costs due to the cow slaughter ban, find the grazing? Carabeef (buffalo meat) can be misunderstood to be beef, and attract the wrath of cow vigilantes who tend to be ruthless and violent.

When there is a sudden uneconomic overstocking of bovines because one can’t find a market for even the decrepit animals, the owners find themselves at the cleft end of the stick. That is, they can neither find the feed nor sell or slaughter them. A solution has not been offered. Even gaushalas run by protagonists of cow ban in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh have shown dead animals by their hundreds.

My issue is not the merits or demerits of the cow-slaughter ban but is focused on policy choices being made without understanding the complexities of the outcomes. A parallel can be found in demonetisation where banks did not comply with RBI order to recalibrate ATMs, or the RBI itself choosing to print currency note in dimensions which did not fit the ATMs.

Have we thought of the ban on the beef exports, in which India leads even Brazil, according to statistics from the US Department of Agriculture, which however includes carabeef in the same category as beef, much like the cow vigilantes do? However, the beef export is less of an issue compared to the economic and logistic plight to which cattle-owners are being to put to.

Shed for the bovines are not something most cattle-owners can afford for the simple fact that in the rural areas, such people have the least land, and often just tether them to a peg in the front of their house. Apparently, we are not yet aware of how much of the extra bovine dung is available and the extent to which it could be used. Firing kitchen chullahs with dried dung cakes is discouraged for the smoke they throw up.

It is not news anymore that such cattle, not now but since over a couple of decades, have been found to have eaten even plastic bags, which, however could have been accidental in the past. Our propensity to increasingly use plastic and discard them recklessly just about anywhere may well see a day when the bovines may see plastic as a fair sized but toxic diet.