India is counting pastoral livestock for the first time in history

Every year, Mir Hamza migrates across Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir with buffaloes, goats and sheep, grazing them as he goes. Last year, he was on this journey with other pastoralists when a car drove into his herd of 15 buffaloes. Because the animals were travelling closely together, Hamza recounted, five died on the spot and the rest were seriously injured.

The group tried to file a claim for compensation from the offending party – but they learnt that they were not entitled to make a claim because the buffaloes were not officially registered with the government. They were told there was nothing anyone could do.

Under India’s current policies, pastoralists, many of whom are from Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes, cannot legally register livestock. Unlike their counterparts on settled land, they cannot access insurance, vaccines, veterinary care and compensation when animals are injured or killed.

“No government or institution is ready to believe that you own these cattle, and this is your livelihood,” Hamza said.

But a historic step may mark a major change in the rights and recognitions afforded to nomadic and migratory herders.

India announced earlier this month that its 2024 livestock census will, for the first time, also enumerate pastoral livestock. Officials say this addition to the count is crucial for recognising pastoralism as a widespread practice and could pave the way toward introducing new resources and programmes for the community. Its advocates hope this shift will help create a policy framework that will eventually allow livestock to be legally registered.

Hamza said this will be the most significant step toward protecting the rights of pastoral communities since the passage of the Forest Rights Act in 2006, among whose aims was to protect the community’s rights to graze and fish on common land. With the census, “our livelihood will be recorded for the first time in the form of a document,” Hamza said. “This is our second opportunity of independence, that for the first time our livelihood can be recognised.”

Ramesh Bhatti is the program director at the Centre for Pastoralism, an NGO that works with pastoral communities across the country. He explained that the government agreed to take this step as a result of sustained pressure from their centre and other NGOs, who have for years made efforts to draw attention to the pastoral community.

There has also been a recent increase in global attention on pastoralism. In February 2022, the United Nations issued a resolution declaring that 2026 would be the International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralists. “By 2026, we should have proper numbers, we should have proper policies and availability of resources,” Bhatti said.

Giving the community access to resources

An estimate by the Rainfed Livestock Network and the League for Pastoral Peoples and Endogenous Livestock Development pegs the number of pastoralists in India at 13 million. The same report determined that 53% of India’s milk and 74% of its meat comes from pastoral animals. “Most of the most productive animals, like buffaloes and cows, come from the pastoral system,” said Bhatti. “But they have never been counted in the economy and the GDP.”

The Centre for Pastoralism and the Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture Network are partnering with the government to create a Pastoral Livestock Support Cell to help complete the census, which begins in September. These NGOs will help with addressing challenges with accurately counting migratory animals by working at a village and ward level to engage pastoralists and identify their routes.

Kavya Chinda, the associate coordinator for the support cell, acknowledged that it will be a significant challenge to count migratory herders, especially those in remote communities. The support cell is partnering with other organisations on the ground and relying on pastoral youth to get the word out, Chinda said.

Hamza said he and other pastoralists are worried that the census will not reach the necessary people, and that he wants to see a more active governmental campaign to spread awareness about the development. “There are communities in distant and remote areas and there are many examples where implementation on ground level does not happen,” he said.

The census will define a pastoralist as anyone who migrates with livestock for at least a month each year and depends on common resources such as village commons and public grazing sites. It will include questions about the pastoralists’ names, genders, routes and the breeds of animals they are raising.

If the government accurately collects that data, Bhatti said, it can be used to give pastoralists access to many resources they cannot currently access, such as healthcare and insurance, and new facilities such as for veterinary care or education along migratory routes.

Pranav Menon, a pastoral rights advocate with a background in law, said that the census data could also be used to develop new solutions to problems pastoral communities face.

“It would be interesting if that counting could also help to build cooperative models around pastoral communities,” Menon said. “Education amongst pastoralist communities is so low. Can there be innovative ideas like mobile schools for those communities, so they don’t have to leave their profession to get educated?”

A legacy of exclusion

Communities have been practising pastoralism for thousands of years in India, but the way of life faces increasing challenges with every year. Herders find, for instance, that pastures are increasingly fenced off, and that highways and urban centres replace traditional routes.

Ilse Köhler-Rollefson is a scientist based in Rajasthan who has spent many decades working with pastoralists, and working against camel extinction. She said the lack of recognition of pastoral rights and existence dates back to the colonial period, ideas from which formed the basis of Indian animal science.

“The British came and they encountered these moving livestock peoples, and that didn’t fit into their worldview,” Köhler-Rollefson said. “They said ‘these guys need to be settled,’ and wanted to tax them.”

But because the communities would not settle, taxing them proved impossible – in response, Köhler-Rollefson said, the colonial administration termed many nomadic tribes “criminal tribes”.

Köhler-Rollefson said that because many Indian animal scientists are trained in the United States and Europe, they imbibe similar views of those who rear livestock, which are centred on the assumption that they must be settled. “This gets instilled into them, this default model that the animal is somehow tied up,” she said. “The idea that animals sometimes move around just isn’t there.”

Even as pastoral lifestyles become more difficult, many herders continue to migrate.

“As much as people want to say it is obsolete and it is not something which is viable in the 21st century, there is a kind of persistence,” Menon said. “These people continue to remain. They are not going away anywhere. There is a facet about their resilience, I feel, because they are so used to being excluded and so used to being marginalised.”

But while gathering data on pastoralists may be a step toward guaranteeing them basic rights, Köhler-Rollefson noted that governments may hesitate to act because pastoralists have been left out of the conversation for so long. “There is so many politics involved in all this, so even if the results are how incredibly important pastoralism is, there is a lot of pressure on governments to do things that don’t benefit pastoralists,” she said.