India, the world’s second-most populous country is home to over 1.32 billion people, 512 million livestock and more than 1 billion poultry in a much diversified ecosystem spread across 3.3 million sq. km. These interconnected system of human, animal and environment is under tremendous pressure to increase livestock production for a growing human population in our developing economy.
The last two decades have witnessed significant growth in the poultry and dairy sectors in India, mainly dominated by intensive livestock production by organized commercial farmers, cooperatives and organizations. This development in the organized and commercial livestock production sector is well supported in the supply of veterinary products and services by private companies and government policies. Such supports are good for bringing production efficiency in organized sector and livestock products (milk, meat and egg) for large population.
Now we need such interventions in unorganized livestock sector. Around 70 million rural smallholders own livestock, mainly indigenous cattle, buffalo, goat, sheep and pigs, suffer with problems especially in women and kids.
On the one side, India is the largest producer of milk in the world and among leading egg and meat producing nations but on the other hand, nearly 48% of children under the age of five are stunted, and 55% of women and 24% of men are anaemic.
Furthermore, the informal sector cannot be transformed into large organized livestock farming instantly due to various grassroots constraints such as lack of resources and low land-holdings. As a consequence, the informal smallholder livestock sector will remain in place for the foreseeable future. Resource constrains and factors affecting animal input and service delivery at grass root level are also reported viz.poor physical infrastructure, financial, awareness, availability of animal health service providers etc. Compromised awareness, lack of availability of appropriate products for smallholder livestock farmers at affordable price further increase this last mile gap in veterinary products and service delivery. Producers of livestock and livestock products are supported by cooperative, organized market and direct market linkage in limited areas while majority of producers are still dependent on informal intermediaries who take relatively more benefits in value chain. Cost of production is increasing while corresponding return are compromising due to intermediaries. Value addition technologies in livestock products are still not reached to large masses handling livestock products. This list of challenges will go on, therefore now we can think on potential of social innovators in solving these problems in livestock sector.
As majority of problem are local in nature, innovators need to think local context first before implementing the tried&tested model of other areas-
· Can we reduce / eliminate povetry with livestock?
· Can we eliminate hunger ?
· Can we ensure good health and well being with livestock?
· Can we empower women with livestock because majority of livestock managed by women?
· Can we transform unorganized livestock sector to successful enterprise for strenghtening of local economy and minimize migration and compromised working environment?
· Can we use IT tools to support livestock farmers for awareness creation, better decision making and market linkage ?
· Can we develop an efficient production system for smallholder livestock farmers?
· Can we develop low cost interventions in value addition and processing of livestock products ? Such interventions will reduce the dependency on intermediaries especially for perisheble livestock products.
· Can we develop brand of regional and local delicacies of livestock products? Diversity in India provides ample scope of intevenrtions in regional products and huge market for social entrepreneurs.
