Collateral damage

India’s latest plan to save its vultures from dying due to drugs used on cattle offers little hope

- VIVEK GUPTA

AFTER A gap of almost 15 years, the Union Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MOEFCC) has released the second National Vulture Conservation Action Plan (2020-25). Yet the report continues to grapple with the same question that prompted India’s first-ever vulture conservation plan in 2006: how to stop the use of a medicine that wiped out almost the entire vulture population in the country. The most common vultures— oriental white-backed, long-billed, and slender-billed declined by more than 96 per cent in a decade (1993-2003), says the latest action plan.

In 2004, bird experts established that diclofenac, a non-steroidal drug given to cattle to treat inflammation, was behind the population crash. When a vulture consumed a cattle carcass with traces of diclofenac, it developed gout and almost immediately died of kidney failure.

In 2006, on the recommendation of the first conservation plan, the Drug Controller General of India (DCGI) banned the veterinary use of diclofenac. In 2015, it restricted the vial size of diclofenac formulation for humans to 3 ml to check its use by the veterinarian, who need much higher dosage for treating cattle. It was also made a schedule H drug (under the Drug and Cosmetics Act 1940), which means it cannot be sold without a doctor’s prescription.