Temporary government policies have a habit of outliving their deadlines. But few survive for 56 years. In February 1968, the Himachal Pradesh government froze the number of animals each herder could graze on the state’s grasslands at the 1966-67 levels. It also set up a Grazing Advisory Committee to examine the “thorny problem” of balancing grazing with forest conservation, amid concerns that overgrazing was causing erosion and siltation that threatened reservoirs such as Bhakra. Two years later, the committee acknowledged that the permit limits had no scientific basis. Its 1970 report called for a scientific assessment of how many animals the state’s forests and alpine pastures could sustainably support and recommended extending the freeze until 1975. The assessment never took place. The freeze, however, continued.
Fifty-six years later, the state is finally confronting the gap created by the policy paralysis. On July 3, the state government introduced the “Grazing Policy, 2026 of Himachal Pradesh”, overturning the 1970 freeze. The new policy lays out, for the first time in five decades, a new criteria for granting permits, as part of “a comprehensive reform of pastoral grazing governance”.
As no new grazing permits were issued after 1970, and only the existing 2,186 permits could be renewed, thousands of pastoralists were pushed into an informal, unrecorded grazing system. Provisional figures from the recently concluded 21st Livestock Census, obtained by Down To Earth (DTE) from the state government, show that sheep numbers have roughly tripled, while goat numbers have increased fivefold. The number of migratory pastoralist families alone now stands at nearly 26,000—more than 10 times the 2,186 permits the state has ever formally recognised.
The criteria for granting permits involves the assessment of available pasture land for grazing; carrying capacity of forest area from which grazing permit has been applied; estimation of livestock comprising buffalo, mule, goat and sheep; assessment of wildlife species dependent on grazing; assessment of livestock of local people having grazing rights; and recommendations of grazing committee regarding grant of permits on rotational basis in the forest compartments so that regeneration of forest area is ensured.
Under the policy, the government is also committing to count the number of pastoralists and animals that exist and assess the state of the land they graze. A key aspect of the policy is that it does not fix a single, permanent ceiling on how many animals a pasture can carry. “…static, carrying-capacity-based regulation is ill-suited to highly variable mountain ecosystems,” the policy document states, arguing instead for “adaptive, resilience-based grazing management, where regulated and monitored grazing sustains grassland productivity, biodiversity, and long-term soil carbon stocks”.
Permit numbers will be reviewed every five years by using remote sensing, soil carbon data and geotagged mapping of herd movements. These numbers can change as pastures do. This review will be done ...
This article was originally published in the August 1-15, 2026 print edition of Down To Earth