Abstract

  The role of cattle rearing in poverty alleviation and socio-economic development of poor and marginal farmers has been recognized by various government agencies and scholars. Next to crop production, dairy/animal farming becomes the secondary source of income for a majority of the farming community, especially small and marginal farmers as well as landless labourers. The cattle play a significant role in the life and economy of the people in India where 70% of the total population is dependent on agriculture. The present study has been carried out to find out the historical development of cattle farming in India, its geographical distribution and impact of programmes and policies on the cattle rearing in the country. The results of the study highlights that cattle rearing has been important during pre-vedic period, it was a major source of meat in the vedic period, in the ancient period it became a one of major factor agricultural development while in medieval period it became an integral part of agriculture. In the pre independence era it was major source milk for the Indian masses and cattle farms were established for milk production for military troops but after independence cattle development programmes were implemented in an organized and planned way. After independence number of cattle population rose from 155.3 thousands in 1951 to 190.9 thousands in 2012. The annual growth rate of cattle in India was 0.66 percent which fell to -0.66 percent in 2012. Cattle development was given importance in five year plans and various specific programmes for cattle development were implemented at meso, macro and micro level in the country. The geographical distribution of cattle reveals the sluggish growth of cattle in various states and most of states record negative growth of male cattle in the country.

Keywords: Cattle Farming; Farming Community; Life and Economy; Development Programmes; Sluggish Growth

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Citation

Citation: Ashish Kumar Parashari and Nizamuddin Khan. "Growth and Development of Cattle Rearing in India".Acta Scientific Agriculture 4.1 (2020): 98-105.

Copyright

Copyright: © 2020 Ashish Kumar Parashari and Nizamuddin Khan. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.