Subscribe
For the first time since 1919, when the first livestock census happened, India will be counting its pastoral livestock, enumerating pastoral communities and their contribution to the livestock sector, as part of the 21st Livestock Census which was launched on October 25.
Why is the pastoral census important? India has a significant population of pastoralists. Every year, thousands of pastoralists, along with their animals, make periodic journeys on foot, from one climatic region to another for availability of food, and to take advantage of suitable pastures and grasslands.
About 20 million pastoralists graze the country’s forests and grasslands, according to organisations working with the pastoral communities. But there are no official numbers as till now there was not much recognition of the age-old livelihood practice of transhumance pastoralism in livestock management.
Pastoralism is one of the oldest and most sustainable food systems that makes a significant contribution to the economy but is poorly documented. It is also understood that lands sustained by pastoralism form the largest carbon sink as grazing of the pastures by herbivores stimulates regrowth of plants.
Since 1919, India has been conducting a livestock census every five years, under which it counts the number of domesticated animals, poultry and stray animals, along with registering information on species, breed, age, sex and diseases. The 20th Livestock Census happened in 2019.
However, a categorical enumeration of the livestock bred in pastoral production systems has never been a part of this exercise. With this year’s Livestock Census, the country will have official figures on the pastoral ecosystem for the first time.
As pastoral systems depend on movement to access feed for the livestock, enumeration at the household level may prove to be challenging. Hence, the government has engaged civil society organisations (CSO) like Sahjeevan, Centre for Pastoralism, Watershed Support Services and Activities Network (WASSAN) and Foundation for Ecological Security (FES), along with pastoral leaders and youth to ensure inclusivity in data collection.
Towards this mandate, the government, along with the support of pastoral communities and CSOs, has come up with a definition for a pastoralist as a guiding principle for enumerators. A pastoralist is one whose:
• Livestock moves outside of his / her village for at least a month in a year
• Livestock depends on common resources (village commons, pastures, grasslands, common water bodies).
Further, the Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture Network, Wassan and Sahjeevan have signed an MoU with the animal husbandry department and have opened a pastoral support cell to bring CSOs together to help in the process.
This cell has been helping the government get data on where the pastoral communities are and in understanding their livestock systems. There is also a pastoral cell within the Union Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying to provide targeted support.
“There is not much known about pastoralism. From the government’s perspective, they have been attuned to just enumerating livestock and trying to sedentarise them, thinking that it’s a primitive and inefficient system. CSOs, for a long time, have been pushing for accounting of pastoral communities to understand their contribution,” Bhavana Rao from FES said.
For the census, traditional pastoral communities in 24 states and Union territories, which have significant pastoral livestock population, have been identified. The states are: Gujarat, Rajasthan, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Arunachal Pradesh, Karnataka, Odisha, Tamil Nadu, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Ladakh, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Sikkim, West Bengal, Punjab, Haryana, Kerala, Jharkhand and Assam.
From August to September, a state coordination team of two to three members in each state has identified districts with pastoral presence and pastoral communities, whose support would be required to ensure counting.
The team, along with district coordination committees of 20 members each, has conducted trainings of enumerators and provided required support.
Following this, the district coordinator will liaise with concerned enumerators to coordinate on their days of enumeration and recommend them the best period when maximum pastoralists would be present in their household after consulting the community leaders.
One to three pastoral youths per pastoral community or pastoral village will be also be assigned to accompany the concerned enumerator to all pastoral households on the day of enumeration to ensure maximum coverage.
Besides giving a credible estimate of the spread of pastoralism in the country, the census will act as a significant step towards enabling the government to include pastoral households in their policy schemes, health programmes and designing policy interventions and public investments that specifically target communities relying on pastoral modes of production.
“Largely, the discourse around livestock in all the government schemes is about millk, and then meat in case of small ruminants to some extent. But there is more to livestock than milk and meat like manure, draught power, culture and this is something that the census data can help in substantiating,” said Harshit Mishra, assistant project manager, FES.
Through this census, the government can also start working on improving traditional pastoral routes, take action on encroachments and provide facilities like resting spaces, water structures, healthcare, along these pasture routes.
Since 2022, there has been a shift in the way the central and state governments look at pastoralism. On August 23, 2022, the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying had written to states with sizeable pastoral populations to focus government schemes on the welfare of pastoral communities.
In the same year, the Union government urged states with sizeable population of such communities to work to prevent this by providing assistance to pastoralists under the National Livestock Mission, Animal Husbandry Infrastructure Development Fund and Rashtriya Gokul Mission (for cattle).
Experts say that the belief that livestock management is done better in stable conditions is also changing.
“There is a whole wave of change also because of the United Nations declaring 2026 the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists (IYRP) and 2024 was the International Year of Camelids (IYC). There is a growing recognition of pastoralism and there are many processes feeding into pastoral advocacy and representation,” said Rashmi Singh, co-chair of IYRP South Asia and assistant professor at IIT Hyderabad.