-Down to Earth So far livestock-related schemes were only catering to settled farmers, herders The Union government admitted that India’s pastoralist communities fell through the cracks when it comes to them benefitting from various schemes. It has urged states with sizeable population of such communities to work to prevent this. There is a significant population of pastoralists or cattle herders across India who move from one place to another to graze their animals....

-Newsclick.in India produces 22% of the world’s total milk production; India is also the largest sheep and goat meat exporter. It is among the largest exporters of bovine meat too. There must be something that livestock producers in India have got right, argues Dr Kohler-Rollefson. On April 11, 2022, researcher Dr Ilse Kohler Rollefson, who has long worked among the camel herders of Rajasthan, delivered the keynote address at the National Livestock...

-GoI Monitor Herders faced discrimination and hardships in managing seasonal migrations Jaga Vashraam Rabari of Vrajvani village in Kutch migrates every summer with his herd of animals for eight months. Villagers in Pattan, around 300 km from home, usually invite and welcome his group but this time, they were not allowed to enter the villages due to rumours around COVID 19. “The presence of police personnel also scared us and our mobility was seriously...

-Scroll.in The trend is also linked to recent locust outbreaks, as large quantities of vegetation provide food for locust swarms. Ravindranath lives in the heart of the Thar desert in India. He and his family are agropastoralists – people who grow crops and rear livestock – in the village of Kalu in Bikaner district, Rajasthan. But the dry grasslands that people like Ravindranath have depended on for centuries for pasture are slowly being...

-The Wire Science The camel is known popularly as the ship of the desert. But for all their resilience in the austere environs of the Thar desert, their numbers have plummeted in recent years. According to the 20th livestock census, released in 2019, there are some 2.5 lakh camels, down from the 4 lakh counted during the previous census in 2012. And this decline has environmentalists, policymakers and camel herders worried. Rajasthan...