STRAY COWS IN INDIA

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Corraling not-so-sacred cows

New Delhi wants stray cattle off its modern streets

Mike McPhate

 

Sunday, January 29, 2006

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New Delhi -- Scattered among this Indian capital of smooth boulevards

and swank open-air markets, where cell-phone-yakking yuppies like to

sip their espressos, is an army of drooling, defecating beasts.

 

Four of them stood recently in a north Delhi commercial strip, their

image reflected in the mirrored walls of street-side office buildings.

Cattle catcher Bhajvir Singh crept from behind. He lunged for the tan

bull with droopy eyes and slipped a lasso over his horns. The brute

craned his neck, let out a great moo, and charged into the path of a

white Mercedes, then, horns lowered, toward a bus stop, jabbing a

man's ankle as he scampered up a ledge. " Out of the way, brother! "

Singh shouted.

 

The bull panted. Belted with a bamboo pole by Singh's crewmate, he

soon surrendered, shuffling into the back of a flatbed truck, the

latest prisoner of a round-up campaign that seeks to rid Delhi once

and for all of its estimated 40,000 itinerant cattle.

 

Cows are as ordinary to Indian cities as hippies once were to Haight

Street. Worshiped by the country's majority Hindus and protected by

law from slaughter, they are almost all owned, illegally, by

small-time dairy vendors who milk the animals in the mornings then

release them to forage among trash heaps. They occasionally go

berserk: Last year, street cattle killed a priest, a retired railway

worker, a housemaid, a scrap dealer and a 45-year-old named Rajveer,

according to Indian news reports.

 

Cows, along with buffaloes, goats, street dogs and rhesus monkeys,

came to dwell in India's cities as a result of authorities' struggle

to manage the country's rapid urban growth. As Delhi's borders have

ballooned, swallowing up scores of adjacent villages, it has absorbed

a great number of village-minded folks, people who see cattle

ownership as a natural right.

 

With the Indian economy's expansion in the last 15 years, driving

Delhi's modern makeover, the presence of snorting livestock has become

intolerable, many here say. " Everyone should be in their own natural

habitat, " said Meera Bhatia, a lawyer who filed a suit to compel the

government to fix the cow problem. " It's not that complicated. "

 

The Delhi cattle roundup is part of a nationwide trend. India's cities

have in recent years sought to shed what some see as a medieval image

that is inconsistent with the country's superpower ambitions. A

once-thriving community of snake charmers has been hounded into

obscurity. Government bulldozers have razed vast swaths of city slums.

And Calcutta officials said in the fall that they would clear the city

of its thousands of " barbaric " hand-pulled rickshaws.

 

Delhi's High Court ordered the city to address the cattle menace in

2002. " The capital city of Delhi should be a show window for the

world, " wrote judges R.S. Sodhi and Anil Dev Singh in their ruling.

" The stray cattle on the roads gives a wrong signal. "

 

Authorities tried a series of failed schemes: small fines, a threat to

cut off cattle owners' electricity, a $50 bounty offered to the public

for captured cows. The new plan -- involving a beefed-up staff of

cattle catchers, microchip tracking devices and a massive new dairy

farm -- is foolproof, say several people involved in its planning.

 

" I expect 100 percent success, " said veterinarian S.K. Yadav, Delhi's

cattle czar.

 

The linchpin of the strategy is the use of microchips implanted in the

bellies of the city's cattle. Captured animals have been auctioned or

taken to outlying asylums, but many returned to the city.

 

Original owners would bribe gatemen, or new owners would offer phony

promises to keep the animal in the countryside. Now, if a cow with a

microchip encoded with the owner's information is found inside city

limits, its owner must pay a $115 fine.

 

As many as 7,000 of Delhi's cattle have so far been micro-chipped, and

officials plan to have them all tagged within 18 months. Meanwhile,

Delhi's illegal cattlemen, called the " dairy mafia " in the local press

for their tough reputation and purported political ties, have been

warned to either sell their animals beyond the city limits or relocate

to a new, subsidized ranch on the western edge of the city. More than

half of the plots at the 140-acre Ghogha Dairy have so far been

bought, say officials.

 

" Nobody wants to go, " said Jagdish, an illegal cattle owner who

declined to give his last name. " It's far. "

 

Jagdish stood beside his brick-walled buffalo stall set back among the

narrow residential lanes of northeast Delhi -- dairymen in the area

torched six cattle trucks last spring, according to a local official.

His nine chained beasts ate mush out of bathtubs amid dung piles and

urine that spilled into the lane. Jagdish rejected the idea that his

business sullied the city. " Tell me when it was ever actually clean, "

he said.

 

Construction at the Ghogha ranch is scheduled to begin soon. It will

include a fodder market, drinking reservoir, veterinary services and a

large milk processing plant, according to the plans.

 

By the time the Commonwealth Games come to Delhi in 2010, officials

hope to have shifted all cattle in the capital region, including those

at 10 legal dairies, to the new property. The dairy will help boost

the efficiency of Delhi's sickly cows, which produce less than

one-third the milk of their American counterparts, says dairy expert

A. Anand.

 

" In days to come dairy farming will become the major driver of the

Indian economy, " said Anand, who is director of technology at Everest

Enterprises, the company managing the ranch as well as manufacturing

the cattle microchips. Anand, like many of those involved in India's

makeover schemes, rejects opponents of the project as self-seeking.

" You spread filth, " he said, referring to illegal dairymen. " You have

to see the larger public welfare. "

 

In a country whose leaders are viewed by most as money-grubbing

scoundrels, though, Delhi's dairymen seem little moved by appeals to

civic duty. On a recent afternoon, two illegal cattle owners, bundled

in scarves against Delhi's short winter, studied a map of the ranch at

the Ghogha property. " Fine, a milk plant, " said Kirtar Singh. " But

will I get the rate I want? " The dairy's milk is expected to sell for

about 38 cents per liter, 4 cents less than what Singh claimed to get

in his neighborhood.

 

Vijendra Singh plans to buy a plot. He hates to uproot his family, he

said, but government men in his neighborhood were hassling him. " I

don't like it, " he said, tugging on a cigarette. " But I don't have a

choice. "

 

Mike McPhate is a member of the Chronicle Foreign Service. Contact us

at insight.