No takers for cow urine cure for virus in city

The Akhil Bharat Hindu Mahasabha may have tried its best to make drinking of cow urine — which it claims is an antidote to Covid-19 — fashionable across the country by holding a cow urinedrinking party last week in New Delhi but this push by the group appears to have found no takers here in the city.

In fact, the managers of the Bhagyanagar gai seva sadan near lower tank bund said there is no truth in the Mahasabha’s claims. Devender Dubey, who heads the animal shelter, which houses around 650 cows, challenged the claim that drinking cow’s urine prevents novel coronavirus infections. “This is impossible. Whoever is making such claims lacks any knowledge. The products from the cow most useful to people are milk and ghee,” he said.

However, there are some who say drinking small quantities of cow urine works for them, not to stop any disease but in other ways. A devotee who visits the cow shelter at lower tank bund regularly, said, “I come here twice a week. I am not sure what the actual health benefits are but I find that it gives me some peace.”

The most demand we have for cow urine is from people who use it to sprinkle around their homes, Dubey said.

Interestingly, after coronoavirus became a household name in the country and the world, the number of people coming here has come down by half. It fell further after the government declared a shutdown. For the past few days, barely

10 or 15 people come to the shelter, Dubey said. “The usual number of visitors averages 150 to 200 a day,” he added.

One of the managers at the shelter, Sudhir Kumar, said on a no moon day, there were instances of as many as

5,000 visiting the shelter. The fall in visitors has also directly hit pushcart vendors making a living from selling leafy vegetables and fruits for people to buy and then feed the cows. “We have ten carts around this shelter, and each of us was making around `1500 to

`2000 a day. Now our income has fallen to about `200 a day,” said Ganesh, one of the pushcart vendors.

The head of the durga bhavani gow seva at Gunfoundry, Sherunath Misra said “We have been running this place for about

12 years. It gives us lot of benefits, whenever I am here I drink gow muthra.”

People also come to collect cow urine to sprinkle around their houses, he added.