Ravi Babu Surisetti*
Research Scholar (PT), Department of Zoology, Andhra University, Veterinary Livestock Officer, Animal Husbandry Department, Government of Andhra Pradesh, India
*Corresponding Author: Ravi Babu Surisetti, Research Scholar (PT), Department of Zoology, Andhra University, Veterinary Livestock Officer, Animal Husbandry Department, Government of Andhra Pradesh, India.
Received: October 31, 2026; Published: November 04, 2026
The cattle shed is where the next pandemic will be stopped, or missed
Every morning in an Indian village, the same quiet scene plays out. A woman milks the buffalo tied beside her house. Children chase each other near the calf shed. The herd walks out to graze along a canal or the edge of a forest. Most of us see a picture of rural life in this. A field veterinarian sees something more. This small courtyard is one of the most important places in the country for public health. If the next serious disease jumps from animals to people, there is a good chance it will happen in a place just like this. About six in every ten emerging infectious disease events in humans come from animals [11]. So the real question is not whether animals and people share diseases. It is whether we notice early enough when they do. And as the numbers below show, India often does not.
Bigger than we think
India has the largest livestock population in the world. The last completed census counted 536.76 million animals, an increase of 4.8 per cent over 2012 [5]. Nearly all of them live in villages: 514.11 million animals, or 95.78 per cent of the total, were counted in rural areas [4]. Most belong to small and marginal farmers and live a few steps from the kitchen.
Here is a fact that surprises many readers. Livestock is no longer a side business to farming. In 2023–24 the sector added Rs 15,05,615 crore to the economy, which is 30.87 per cent of agriculture and allied GVA and 5.49 per cent of India's entire GVA. Its value added nearly tripled between 2014–15 and 2023–24, growing at 12.77 per cent a year [8]. India now ranks first in the world in milk production, second in eggs and fourth in meat [7]. The Economic Survey 2025–26 reports that farm growth in FY26 was driven mainly by livestock and fisheries rather than crops [15]. So, when disease strikes animals, it strikes the fastest-growing part of the rural economy.
What disease quietly takes away
Some losses make headlines. Lumpy skin disease did. In 2022–23, it infected 35.61 lakh cattle and killed 2.08 lakh. Rajasthan alone recorded over 76,000 deaths among 15.67 lakh infected animals [20].
Other losses never make the news. Take brucellosis, a disease most city readers have never heard of. Brucellosis in Indian livestock causes a median annual loss of US$3.4 billion, and cattle and buffalo account for 95.6 per cent of it [18]. That is a single disease, and it also infects the farmers, inseminators and veterinarians who handle these animals.
Then there is rabies. For two decades, India was believed to lose about 20,000 people a year to rabies. A nationwide ICMR survey of nearly 79,000 households now estimates 5,726 human rabies deaths each year [19]. That is real progress. But government records confirmed only 54 rabies deaths in a recent year [21]. Thousands of deaths, and only dozens on record. That gap tells us less about rabies and more about how blind our reporting systems still are.
India has quietly built a strong foundation
The good news is that India has changed the way it fights animal disease. The old pattern was simple: an outbreak came, a vaccination drive followed, and then everything went quiet until the next crisis. The National Animal Disease Control Programme began to break that cycle with nationwide vaccination against foot-and-mouth disease and brucellosis. The Livestock Health and Disease Control Programme went further, adding Mobile Veterinary Units, better cold chains and digital records for each animal on the Bharat Pashudhan Portal [6]. The World Bank-supported AHSSOH programme is building safer labs and state-level One Health committees in five pilot states, and training Pashu Sakhis, women para-veterinarians who carry disease information from the household to the department [25]. The Animal Pandemic Preparedness Initiative, under the National One Health Mission, adds genomic surveillance, joint rapid response teams and models that read animal, human and climate signals together [10]. The National Institute of One Health in Nagpur gives doctors, veterinarians and environmental scientists a common table for the first time [2]. On paper, the plan is sound. So why does it still feel unfinished on the ground?
What the framework cannot see from a distance
What will actually make the difference
Where one health will be won
One Health will not be won in Delhi or Nagpur alone. It will be won in the cattle shed, the village dispensary and the district laboratory, by people who are trained, connected and trusted.
The next time you see a woman milking a buffalo in the morning light, remember this. She may be the first person in the country to notice that something is wrong. The framework is ready. The real test is whether our systems can hear her in time.
Citation: Ravi Babu Surisetti. “One Health Begins in the Village". Acta Scientific Veterinary Sciences 8.4 (2026): 01-02.
Copyright: © 2026 Ravi Babu Surisetti. 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.
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