The reserved lands for grazing of animals which are there since long are now under the grip of the encroachers. The Government has no information about the extent of land so far encroached upon. It is left to the discretion of the Revenue official who de-reserve it willfully for a little gain. A thorough inquiry alone can establish the quantum of corruption since 1964.
Because of grazing problem, traditional cow keeping is shrinking day by day. The number of indigenous cows has come down remarkably. long lines of local breed cows and bulls pave to animal markets. Villages are, now, devoid of animal wealth. Hybrid cows, rarely seen in villages, are kept fastened to dowels, under cool sheds, day and night, sufficiently fed with dry fodder and water. When villagers sell away their local breed cows, it is the butcher houses which buy them in bulk through their agents in the market.
Yet, lovers of tradition, in order to sanctify their houses with pastes of cow-dung on auspicious occasions, have kept cows at their backyards. The local cows, not being economically remunerative as those do not yield much milk, are not as good as the hybrid ones.
Hence, these are unhooked in the morning to go at large and come in the evening. The owner gives some water to drink and a handful of straw. At times, this little service also is not available for them.
In dry and rain-fed areas, soon after paddy crop is yielded, these local cows become almost unwanted. There is a social system followed in rain-fed areas since time immemorial that a man is commonly appointed in the gram sabha (public meeting) to tend the entire flock of cows of the village on a nominal payment by each farmer. After seed is sown in the month of July, he begins to tend the cows until paddy is harvested in the month of February. Thereafter, these cows are left at large to graze, with none to look after. To call them as ‘domestic animal’ is only a name sans any of its characteristic. As evening falls they lie on the highway impeding the traffic.
As a result, cultivators having little scope of irrigation, either by dug wells or any other temporary sources of their own, dare not go for summer crops in apprehension that they have to guard day and night to save the crop from these domestic cows, let loose day and night. More than a lakh of wells, dug in ‘Millions Well’ scheme in Odisha, lie unutilized for more than three decades. The age-old social practice to let cows and bulls free to graze just after the common crop is yielded, continues till date.
Half a century back, institutions of local self Government like Gram Panchayats, NACs and Municipalities had ‘kine houses’, where these uncared for cows and bulls were kept in custody, and any body, who could prove his ownership, took away his cow/bull on payment of the amount spent on their maintenance during the period of arrest. This system has become obsolete at the grass root at present though, the Government of Odisha, in order to save Badadanda from the riddles of bulls, built a kine house at Puri to gather these uncared for bulls, bearing the expenses of their management. In Maharashtra, Anna Hazare raised a social movement in this regard that forced the Government to frame a grazing law in the State. In Odisha, neither has the problem been widely discussed, nor the Government is aware of the problem, let alone framing a grazing policy. A law in Odisha not to let the domestic animals free to graze in summer needs to be framed to encourage summer cultivation utilising whatever minimum source of irrigation available in Odisha.
(The writer lives in Sonepur)