Centre sets aside ₹50 cr to cover 40mn cattle
The Centre is set to assign each of the country’s milkproducing cows a identity card or UID similar to the Aadhaar number allotted to every Indian and the deliverable targets in this year’s Union Budget show ₹50 crore assigned for the project to cover 40 million cattle.
In 2015, a government committee had recommended UID for cows to prevent their trafficking following a Supreme Court direction that heard a plea to stop cow smuggling.
According to a 2015 expert committee’s recommendations, cattle owners will be responsible for the registration of the cows. “Registration proof must be maintained by the owner of the cattle which may be transferred to the next owner in case a legitimate sale/transfer takes place,” it had stated.
Requesting anonymity, a dairy department official said the agriculture ministry, which will implement the programme, has already acquired the UID technology, which is a cheap, tamperproof polyurethane tag containing a cow’s biological details like breed, age, sex, height and special body marks etc. Each card will cost ₹8-10.
First proposed two years ago, the animal UID scheme, called Pashu Sanjivini, is part of a larger programme dedicated to dairy and fisheries sectors. According to experts, growth in these sectors is important if the government wants to achieve its target of doubling farmers’ income by 2022. Economists said it would be nearly impossible to achieve this target through cultivation alone since a majority of farmers can’t increase the yield as they work on small parcels of land.
In a Union Budget speech seen as pro-poor, finance minister Arun Jaitley announced on Thursday the setting up of Fisheries and Aquaculture Infrastructure Development Fund and an Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Development Fund worth ₹10,000 crore.
About ₹200 crores have also been set aside for an artificial insemination drive to improve cattle breeds, with a view to “upgrade” the entire cattle population. The agriculture ministry’s Rashtriya Gokul Mission has claimed that milk from indigenous cattle was healthier due to higher content of “A2 allele of beta casein”, a protein. It seeks to upgrade nondescript breeds using elite indigenous breeds like Gujarat’s Gir, Rajasthan’s Sahiwal and Rathi, Deoni, Tharparkar, Red Sindhi of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh.
Both these projects are part of “output” and “outcomes” targets set in the budget, which will be monitored by NITI Aayog. India has about 45 million “in-milk” cattle.
“Animal husbandry gets only 5.4% of the overall agricultural ministry budget despite livestock being the most critical sector for most marginalised farmers,” Kavitha Kuruganti, a farm activist said.
In the 2017-18 budget, the government had scrapped the traditional distinction between “plan” and “non-plan” distinction of expenditure, switching instead to revenue and capital expenditure. This allowed the setting of Budget “output and outcome” targets, starting last year.
Cow is considered sacred in Hinduism and self-styled cowprotection groups have carried out attacks on animal traders, especially Muslims, in many states.
According to the budget, the deliverable target is enrolment of 40 million cattle, while the outcome is a “20% increase in milk production”. In policymaking parlance, output is a quantitative result, while outcome refers to qualitative impacts. For artificial insemination, the output target is 1.50 million sex-sorted doses to “increase availability of high genetic merit heifers”.
NEW DELHI: