The 'cattlelogue' of woes: Can gaushalas solve the menace of stray cows?

Over 800 emaciated cows huddle in a single pen Lucknow's Kanha Upvan. Uttar Pradesh’s largest government-run cattle shelter has 15 such pens and new animals arrive here every day. The sheds where they are fed are cramped. The weak don’t even make it to the feeding troughs. 

The conditions are better at the Shri Gaushala Society’s cow shelter on GT Road in Panipat, Haryana. Though overcrowded, here the volunteers feed the cattle and clean the pens regularly. An ambulance is on standby and a separate shelter across the road houses sick and injured cattle. 

There’s a reason why the two gaushalas are so different. Unlike Kanha Upvan, Shri Gaushala Society is privately-run and is not compelled by the district administration to accommodate the ballooning population of stray cattle in the region. Animal welfare activists say that stray cows are no better off in overcrowded and resource-strapped government gaushalas than they are on the road. Though the interim budget has allocated Rs 750 crore for cow protection, the question is, how many more stray cows can our economy support? 

So many laws, so little impact 

Haryana was among the first states in India to enact the Gauvansh Sanrakshan and Gausamvardhan Act in 2015 which enforces a ban on cow slaughter and curbs the smuggling of cows outside the state. 

It also instituted Haryana Gau Seva Aayog to implement the law.

What’s more, in September 2018 it announced that the state would be stray cattle-free by January 2019. 

That has not happened and stray cattle continue to wreak havoc on the streets and in the countryside. Recently, villagers near Panipat rounded up more than 100 stray bovines and sent them to a private cow shelter, shelling out Rs 1,600 per animal. 

Uttar Pradesh is no different. This year, the state government allocated Rs 447 crore for building of cow shelters. Yet stray cows have become such a menace that farmers are up in arms against the government’s cow protection policies. In Barabanki’s Haidargarh tehsil, farmer Tej Narain says, “This season, we lost almost 60 bighas of crops to stray cows. I wonder why the government feels so much empathy for cows, and so little for us!”

The ‘cattlelogue’ of woes

Experts estimate that land equivalent of 17,200 football fields would be needed to accommodate all of UP’s abandoned cattle. Though the state plans to set up new cattle shelters around its district jails and gauchar bhumi (common pasture land), this may not be enough. For instance, in Chandauli, near Varanasi, only two out of 113 gram sabhas have some gauchar bhumi left. 

At the government cow shelters, overcrowding leads to the spread of disease, and since they are kept all in one place, the sick cows cannot compete with the healthy ones for food. Again, while private shelters say that it costs Rs 80-100 a day to feed a cow, the Uttar Pradesh government is expected to sanction Rs 30 per day per cow for fodder. “This will just about keep the animal alive,” remarks Anurag Mishra, who runs a private gaushala in Lucknow. 

Consequently, mortality rates are high in government shelters. Another reason for the high mortality is that many of the animals have intestines full of plastic which they ingested while foraging for food. To address this problem, Animal welfare organisation Karuna Society, based in Puttaparthi in Andhra Pradesh, started the Plastic Cow Project, which conducts surgeries to remove the plastic from cattle intestines. 

However, cows that have been operated upon can never go back to normal life and need lifelong care, says Anjali Gopalan, founder, All Creatures Great and Small, a sanctuary for sick and abandoned animals in Faridabad. “We need a total ban on plastic waste and awareness about what plastics are doing to stray animals,” she says. 

Dairies in disguise

Most of the cattle at government-run gaushalas are those which have been abandoned because they do not produce milk. Most private gaushalas, however, sell milk to finance operational costs. A 2018 report on the state of 179 gaushalas across the country by  the Federation of the Indian Animal Protection Organi­sa­tions (FIAPO) states that 86 per cent of the gaushalas surveyed got bulls to impre­gnate cows and 74 per cent were dep­endent on the revenues from selling milk.

However, making a gaushala double as a dairy results in several undesirable practices. It encourages further breeding of animals and they get labelled as ‘productive’ or ‘non-productive’, depending upon their milk-giving abilities.  

The Way Forward 

“Gaushalas can’t be unsustainable places where cattle are treated like objects of charity,” says Aparna Rajagopal, who runs animal sanctuary Beejom Farm in Noida. “The need of the hour is to develop alternative, non-dairy oriented models in which cattle are active contributors — not passive recipients of government largesse,” she says.