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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | India's Livestock Markets Have Historically Been Marked By Mobility and Cross-Country Transactions -Himanshu Upadhyaya

India's Livestock Markets Have Historically Been Marked By Mobility and Cross-Country Transactions -Himanshu Upadhyaya

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published Published on Jul 5, 2017   modified Modified on Jul 5, 2017
-TheWire.in

Legislative action that primarily looks at cattle mobility as ‘acts of smuggling cattle out of state for slaughter’ is deeply misguided and betrays a misunderstanding of how India’s cattle have been bought and sold since the British Raj.

Like many poorly drafted laws, the recently notified Livestock Markets (Regulation) Rules is so pre-occupied with its self-righteousness that it fails to realise the harm that it would cause. If the colonial era’s Livestock Improvement Act of 1933 pronounced a death-knell for native cattle breeders, these rules, in a similar fashion, aim to eject India’s cattle traders from the livestock market in a single stroke.

The Livestock Improvement Act (1933) made cattle breeding a highly centralised, formalised, authorised and technologised affair. Despite evidence of the mutually symbiotic relation between settled cultivators and nomadic cattle breeder, those who drafted this legislation in the Bombay presidency sought to marginalise the nomadic cattle breeder. The act paved the way for bringing in a policy of licensed bulls and criminalised the practice of cattle breeding by native breeders who could not negotiate newly emerging bureaucracy with necessary paperwork. The act granted overarching powers to colonial officers from the veterinary stream to enter the cattle-shed in order to inspect the licensed bulls and take note of their condition. The act also had a provision that if a veterinary officer noticed a deterioration in the condition of the licensed bull, he could initiate the proceedings to cancel the licence.

India’s cattle rearing traditions and economy are marked by mobility and exchanges. To imagine that transactions at livestock markets must happen between two land holding agriculturists, as the recent rules do, is to expose to the world how little our self-appointed animal welfare enthusiasts understand about our past.

Arguing why the latest intervention was long overdue, Maneka Gandhi paints a very grim picture of India’s livestock markets:

    “Over the years, (livestock markets) has become a vicious violent area. For one thing, it is no longer on government land but on the land rented out by private people. It is no longer for farmers. There are no trees, no water troughs. Animal are often dragged there and kept tied for hours in the sun. It is controlled by a mafia of sellers and buyers and patrolled informally by police people who take a hafta in the trade. Everyone sports knives and guns…These “farmer markets” are now simply butcher markets. The law says only kisan can buy or sell. Not a single kisan will be found near these hell holes.”

Any researcher who has engaged with India’s bovine (i.e. cattle and buffalo) economy with some seriousness would have heard the oft-repeated factoid: “ownership of livestock in India shows more egalitarian distribution compared to ownership of land”.

However, given that the recent rules compel “animal market committee to verify that the purchaser is an agriculturist by seeing the relevant revenue documents”, there is now a possibility that a large number of cattle traders who have engaged in the occupation at livestock markets for generations will be forced to exit.

Policymaking regarding our cattle must not be handed over exclusively to a handful of self-appointed animal welfare enthusiasts, who paint a romantic picture of livestock markets in years immediately after Independence and reduce them to grim hellholes in recent times by exaggerating the slaughter threat that faces India’s cows. A serious academic engagement with history tells us that the cattle rearing tradition in India involved transactions that were not always between adjacent villages, but at times involved mobility across districts and state borders.

Please click here to read more.

TheWire.in, 4 July, 2017, https://thewire.in/153924/indias-livestock-mobility-cross-country-transactions/


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