We Indians respect a cow and are supposed to treat a cow as our mother. This may sound very funny for the modern urban liberal intellectual Indian. For a rural liberal intellectual Indian it may sound less funny and for the illiterate it might make some sense. Milk produced by cows is very a nutritious food and to eliminate malnutrition and to increase the income of rural households dairy is one of the best industries to get people involved. Thanks to the groups and federations that make more milk production and supply to all the needy and still there is a shortage of milk and there is also malnutrition in our country.
Milk is also produced from buffaloes, goats and other animals which are consumed by different groups of people at different places. Such a diversity should be appreciated and is inherent to a vast country like India. The dark side of any good comes to the fore due to the nature of human beings. Greed is the source of all human misery and milk production is also affected by it. In order to produce more milk we have begun to import foreign breeds and began to neglect local varieties of livestock and developed nations are making billions of dollars just by supplying semen which should otherwise should have only a natural action.
Technological development has only increased the greed of the human mind and with new tools there are novel ways to accumulate. A cow is useful only till produces milk and because of technology the ox is rendered useless and sent to slaughter houses. The animal rights activists are more than happy to kill an animal than make to work tirelessly and be underfed. The activists prefer death to the animal, but strange are the ways of activists. A human being is kept in suffering against his wish in hospitals and treating him for incurable diseases sometimes even against his wish making loads of money and allowed to die when there is no further treatments are not possible.
The animal is not given such a chance to earn its livelihood because there are no offices for the animals to work and seek a decent livelihood. Thanks to some philanthropists and activists there are huge choultry like facilities for the livestock where they are fed and manure is collected and sold. The milk produced is sold and both the man and livestock are surviving on each other. the nature has crude sense of balance and we tend to disturb it. The females of the livestock are considered more useful because of the milk it can give but the males of livestock are considered as a burden and sent of to slaughter houses.
In the good old days, the male livestock could have worked in the fields but due to modernity- productivity issues and also grazing land issues male stock lost their jobs and hence their livelihood. Everyone who has lived in small towns and villages that a ox can pull considerable load on the roads and now it should be possible to use the same ox to generate some useful energy. Why is it not possible the ox be used to create electricity? The electricity can then be sold and the dung can used for production of gas and also as a manure there by increasing the income.
Having a huge population was once considered a curse but now it is a boon. Similarly having a huge livestock population was considered a curse but it should become a boon if we are able to efficiently generate electricity by making the animals earn their livelihood in a dignified manner.
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