No. 76 (May-June 1993)

TEN years ago, almost to date, Ileft the warm and familiar comfort ofhome, family and the city for the firsttime, to enter a veterinary collegewhich was situated in the heartlandof rural Haryana, the land of ‘dudhand dahi’, in a place called Hisar.

I never imagined that my choiceof profession and place would playsuch a major role in making me what Iam today.

It was my twelfth and final year atschool. Everyone was busy applyingto some college or the other, studyingfor entrance exams and rushing off tocoaching classes after regular school.I was blissfully unconcerned aboutwhat I was going to do next. I wasintent on enjoying my last year ofschool and my prefectship, workinghard towards my arangetram, thetraditional first public dancerecital of a Bharata Natyamdancer and studying for myfinal Board exams.

I was utterly confusedas to what I wanted topursue after school. Sure, Iwas good at many things,from academics to being anartiste (with an ‘e’): singing,dancing, playing musicalinstruments, drawing,drama, debating, not tomention my bit of ‘socialwork’—teaching kids in theBhil Basti near school. I didnot, however, have a

burning passion for any one particularsubject. I wanted to excel at all I did.My one fulltime involvement over thepast five years had been my dancingbut I was not convinced that I coulddedicate my life to dance. My parentshad thankfully dinned into theirdaughter’s head the importance ofbeing economically independent.Amma and Appa would gently attemptto discuss my future plans with me.

But each time I thought about acareer, I would come up with adifferent career goal, ranging fromcommercial art, to architecture, drama,medicine, engineering, hotelmanagement, mathematics, botanyand medicine. Interestingly,veterinary science never once crossedmy mind, nor figured in ourconversations, in spite of growing up

in a home that was a naturalmenagerie.

While on vacation, I met my doctorcousin. Rani asked me: “Have youever thought of veterinary science?I’ve always wished I’d opted for thatinstead of medicine. Imagine dealingwith hundreds of different species!”The idea stuck and grew in my mind.This certainly sounded different,exciting and unusual, off the beatentrack. “Yes,” I decided. ‘This is it. Iwill give it a shot.” I spent the rest ofthat holiday reading James Herriot andGerald Durrell.

The results arrived. I did well, gota distinction and marks good enoughto get me into any subject of mychoice, including medicine/engineering. But by now I was goingall out for veterinary science. Back in

Delhi, an old family friendarranged for me to meet thedaughter of their friend, asecond-year veterinarystudent in Hisar. Nitya wasto become one of mydearest friends, a valuableprofessional colleague andan outstanding veterinarysurgeon. Her decision,unlike mine, had been a wellthought out one, manymany years ago while shewas still in school and anactive member of GeraldDurrell’s Jersey Wild LifePreservation Trust.

Life with Livestockby

Sagari Ramdas

India’s livestock population of 400 million is the largest in the world. It plays a crucial role in ourpredominantly agricultural economy. Yet we have a pitifully small number of trained professionals to look

into the health of our livestock, especially in rural areas where they are needed most. Sagari Ramdas is oneof the very few women who has taken on the challenging task of working as a rural veterinarian.

Sagari on graduation day at Hisar Agricultural University,December 1986

24 MANUSHI

Our meeting further convinced meof my choice. Of course, only later didshe confess that she’d made Hisarsound so wonderful, playing downthe negative aspects, so that I wouldjoin.

Getting admitted was a bigstruggle. Being a Delhi student, I wasonly eligible to join Hisar/Pant Nagar,but in both these places universityauthorities were not at all keen to havea woman from Delhi. There werelimited seats for Delhi candidates.Never mind the fact that my markswere higher than those of anyone elseapplying.

You — A Vet?My decision came as quite a

surprise to the family; a mixture ofdisbelief and relief that I’d actuallydecided on something were thedominant emotions of Amma andAppa. My friends were prettysceptical about Sagari, the dancer,becoming a vet. How come she madethis decision so suddenly? They wereconvinced that I’d switch trackssooner or later — after the initialeuphoria wore off. But no one tried todissuade me.

There were mixed reactions fromothers in our social circle. Manywomen said,”Oh, how I wish I wasyou. I always wanted to be a vet.”But the majority, both men and women,were pretty aghast. Most people areso used to hearing a womansay: “I’m doing Englishliterature or philosophy,etcetera,” that they were wellprepared with the “Oh, howsweet” reply even beforehearing me out. It’s onlywhen they heard “veterinaryscience” that they got astunned look on their facesand couldn’t even respond.Many said: “Oh, it’s sounfeminine. What scope isthere for a girl? Will you beable to work with all that dirtand dung and muck?”

Being a vet in rural India was notclassy, hip or where the big buckswere. It was also an “unwomanly”profession. “Imagine doing physicallabour like that,” people said. “That”referred to cowdung, pig shit andwhat have you. Their ‘caste’ bias alsoplayed a role, I firmly believe. Overthe years, such reactions became morepronounced. I later opted to work asa rural vet and specialise in ruralanimal reproduction problems. Therewere thankfully many who did supportme and continue to do so.

Vet College was one huge cultureshock. Everything was new andforeign: the subject, hostel life, ruralIndia and, above all, being one of justtwo women in an entering class of 80.The remaining 78 were burly sons ofthe soil, true Haryanvis. HaryanaAgricultural University (HAU) was amassive sprawling university, plannedon the lines of America’s Land Grantcolleges. (I studied at one of themsome years later and discovered thatthe average Californianundergraduate was pretty similar tothe average HAU undergraduate!)The Vet College was the oldeststructure on the campus.

There was a grand total of 15women in the entire Vet College, whichhad a total strength of about 500students. We women had to room inthe home science hostel for girls as

there was no separate hostel forwomen vet students. We found thisslightly inconvenient as our schedulewas very different from that of theother hostel women, leading toconstant clashes over their makingmerry while we had exams and viceversa. The hostel was also pretty faroff from the clinic, the college and thelabs, making late night duty andresearch a problem. The positive sideof living in this hostel was that wegot to interact with women from ruralbackgrounds. Many girls were firstgeneration educated Haryanvis, andwe got to understand theirexperiences and problems. Suddenlyleaving the security of the village andcoming to this huge campus was adifferent, but as major a culture shockfor them as it was for me. Wenevertheless managed to do someinteresting things together, includingan anti-dowry play.

The first day of class wasunforgettable: Namrata (anotherwoman student) and I entered, to facean onslaught of catcalls, whistles,hoots and jeers, chalk pieces aimed atspecific parts of our anatomy and thehorrific ‘HAU’ laugh. I felt sick in thepit of my stomach, humiliated andvery angry. What had we done todeserve this? Namrata and I grittedour teeth and walked in, trying not tobat an eyelid. I was grateful that there

were two of us and that I wasnot on my own.

It was quite surprisingand annoying that a largenumber of the Hisar boyspersisted with this type ofbarbaric behaviour almost tothe end of our fourth year.They were particularly crudethe first time we wore jeans(far more convenient to workin), the first time we woreshort sleeved shirts (toconduct a pregnancydiagnosis), the first time wewore skirts on a particularlyVaccinating sheep

No. 76 (May-June 1993)

hot and sultry summer day. Classesbegan and I found myself doing verywell, getting A grades in all thesubjects and thoroughly enjoyingwhat I was learning. I loved the mixtureof theory, practicals and lots ofoutdoor work in the fields, farms andclinic. I did not find the practical workparticularly difficult. Veterinaryscience does not mean all brawn andno brains. Basic intelligence and aminimum amount of physical fitnessis no doubt,essential. I was soontopping my class. This brought mixedreactions from both male colleaguesand professors.

Male ReactionMales in general (there were

exceptions) were convinced wewould be unable to cope. Theirattitude was: “These city chickshave come here to have a goodtime; we’ll teach them a lesson!How dare girls even imagine thatthey can master this profession?”Nothing we did in fact would evermake us acceptable. If we did well,we were muggers and chamchasof the teachers; if we did badly itwas, “See, I told you so.” Ourgender was used against us eitherway. I feel Namrata and I got treatedparticularly badly: we had both thewrong gender and the wrongbackground (city girls).

When I excelled in a subject, itwas, “Oh, she’ll fail in thepracticals.” But that’s not whathappened. We were as competentas our male colleagues at casting abullock, performing a PregnancyDiagnosis (PD) on a buffalo,artificially inseminating a cow, ordoing various surgical procedures.We insisted on doing everythingwithout any ‘concessions’ beingshown to us. We did not want to betreated as if we were handicappedbecause of our gender.

Our teething problems—every vetstudent, regardless of gender, willprobably have initial problems in

doing a PD or introducing a needleinto the thick hide of a buffalo/camel,or restraining an animal — wereattributed to our gender: “She is awoman after all.” The boy who failedat something, first shot, was ignoredor said to be “unwell,” or (worstpossible scenario) told he was“behaving like a girl.”

Whether you are a boy or a girl,you still need help to persuade thatobstinate buffalo to enter the “crush”(the structure used to restrain theanimal); you still need five people tohold the buffalo in place, wherever

improvement programmes is the ruralwoman, who plays a vital role in caringfor livestock.

As women, we had to work twiceas hard to prove ourselves. Wecouldn‘t afford to slip up for even amoment. Many of the teaching staffwere just as biased as the students.They pretended that they couldcompletely ignore our presence inclass. It infuriated me whenever theyaddressed the class with “Well,gentlemen,” when there were twowomen in class who were therebyunacknowledged. This wasn‘t just a

slip of the tongue, but showedinherent gender bias. It occurred allthe time. Imagine being ignoredthrough four-and-a-half years ofclass. Other male professors wouldgo out of their way to narratederogatory and crude jokes aboutwomen in class, supposedly tohumorously illustrate an otherwisedry subject. Here are some prizeexamples.

In a pathology class: “Thefemale Anopheles mosquito is likethe female of every species — ablood sucker.”

In a reproductive physiologyclass:

“Female dogs, bitches in heat,are like the human female—alwaysready.”

In a poultry reproduction class:“The male cock is like the humanmale. He cannot control himself,but must prove his virility withevery female he sees.”Question by one student: “Are

there no male contraceptives forcocks?”

Answer by teacher: “Why are you(sic) interested in contraception forCocks? Come to me when you needit. I’ll give you advice.” In one class,the teacher, a Rajneesh devotee,lectured on “free sex and free love”instead of his lesson.

Every time this occurred, Namrataand I would walk out of class and

With one of the women para-vets

there is no crush, so that you canperform a PD. In certain normalprocedures, such as assisting at adifficult delivery, I have often felt it isan advantage to be a woman. Oursmaller hands can more easily enterthrough the vaginal opening of a cow/goat/ sheep. When I began my ruralvet service it was far easier for me tointeract with village women than formy male colleagues. And in rural India,the key to effective livestock

26 MANUSHI

complain to the Dean and theStudents’ Council, but to no avail.They thought this was a harmless formof entertainment and not a blatantmeans of sexual harassment. Many ateacher would take it out on us formaking a complaint by lowering ourgrade. This was one of the majordisadvantages of our entirely internalsystem of grading, with no objectiveand anonymous scoring of our exampapers. One of the professors was soanti-women that he went out of hisway to threaten us: “You think you’llget a good grade? I’ll see that youwon’t.” He never gave us anythinghigher than a “C”, no matter how wellwe did. The teachers furtherreinforced the traditional maleexploitative attitudes towards womenand encouraged the boys to behaveeven more crudely by providing themwith ‘’biological and scientificjustifications” as to why men werenaturally built to be “molestors andeve-teasers.”

A frustrated gynaecologistteacher attempted to hold a womanstudent’s hand — inside the rectumof a buffalo! — when he wassupposed to be teaching her to do arectal examination of a large animal!Fortunately, he was removed from thatpost and when we came togynaecology classes we did not havehim teaching us.

We took action against one suchoffender. We caught him makingvulgar and suggestive nude drawingsof women on the blackboard, with ournames scrawled all over them. Wehoped that this visible harassmentwould be taken more seriously thanour previous complaints and theculprits suitably punished. Wesubmitted an official complaint to theDean, the Vice-Chancellor and theStudents’ Council. We refused towithdraw our case, despite threats,bribes and pleas. Everyone wanted toprotect the goondas and thought aprivate apology would suffice. We

rejected this proposed solution: it wasnot an issue of pride and ego. Thiswas sexual harassment and we wantedthe culprits to be punished.

The battle lasted a year. Finally,the Dean meekly let them off with amere warning! Amazing! Wediscovered-there were no rules or legalpunishment for such instances ofsexual harassment. No wonder mostrapists and molestors get away scot-free. The law is heavily weighed intheir favour. Nevertheless, there wasa positive impact. The boys in the VetCollege apparently realised that wewere ready to speak out and wouldnot keep silent. Our last six months ofuniversity were by and large free ofcatcalls and chalk pieces.

Graduation was around the corner.Again we were at the crossroads.What next? I finished with the highestOGPA (overall grade point average ona scale of 400) and was theprospective gold medallist of theclass of ’82. Due to no fault of mine, Iwas denied the gold medal. In mysecond year a strike prevented us froman exam and the entire class wasarbitrarily awarded an ‘F’. We wereallowed to reappear for the exam thenext year, and I got my ‘A’. Butaccording to ‘rules’, anyone with an‘F’.was denied the gold medal. Ifought and pleaded that my ‘F’ wasdue to the strike. The strange thingwas that, during other strikes wherewe missed exams we were not given‘Fs’.

The VC could have waived the rulein the light of the ‘history’ behind the‘F’, but wouldn’t. I think they all tooksome kind of sadistic pleasure indenying me the gold medal. Anythingto teach a woman a lesson and puther in her place. This onlystrengthened my resolve not to givein, to pursue my career interests andnot let them get the better of me.

Becoming a Rural VetI wanted to be a rural vet and deal

with rural field realities. I didn’t want

to specialise yet. I needed tounderstand the real-life problemsfaced by poor livestock producers. Idid not want to become yet anotherarmchair vet researcher.

Here again, I received noencouragement from my professors,who couldn’t understand why a goldmedallist wanted to waste her time inthe field. “A gold medallist, and thattoo a girl, will not be able to live andwork in a village situation,” they said.“You should specialise in an avant-garde subject such as veterinarybiotechnology and immunology. Youshould think of a research cumacademic teaching line in auniversity.” Here, once again, I waspresented clearcut areas where awoman should work and where sheshouldn’t. Rural areas and largeanimals were definitely out of bounds,in their view.

My decision had its roots in 1984,another major turning point in mystudent days. Nitya and I were part ofa team of students doing a study onthe pollution and development effectsof the Orient Paper Mills on the peopleand Surrounding environment inMadhya Pradesh. This was part of anenvironment education programmeconducted by a group of Vidushaks,engineers and historians turned socialactivists, living in a place calledVidushak Kharkhav in MadhyaPradesh. We lived in a village and hadto interact with a range of people andliving creatures: Jats, displacedtribals, casual and contract labour,union workers, management, villagers,fisherfolk, police, poor women,buffaloes, cows and poultry. Thisexperience raised some importantquestions for us about the other sideof development, the environmentaleffects on poor people, of big dams,factories, mines and energy intensiveproduction systems. It also called intoquestion current development modelsand made us ask, for whom, by whomand at whose cost they were being

No. 76 (May-June 1993)

established. I began tosee myself as an activeplayer in thisdevelopment processsurrounding me andnot just a passivebystander. Iexperienced anincredible flush ofenergy and anexplosion of creativity.It was as if many newareas of living anddoing opened up forme. No longer did I seemyself as just workingfor money, or as a dogand cat vet, or as an“on the way to USA in search forpersonal satisfaction”cynicalprofessional. I found a new meaningin my profession and a purpose in mylife. It was as if i’d woken up after along , long sleep and was enjoyingeach moment of being awake. I spentthe year following graduationtravelling around the country on atravel grant, visiting a number ofNGOs involved with animalhusbandry work. In the process Iwould meet local vets, universityresearch scientists, extension workers,Operation Flood programme officialsand people in cooperative societies—I wanted to get a feel of what washappening in the field, the kind ofresearch being conducted in livestockproduction, the nature of extensionand development programmes inpractice. It was an invaluableexperience. I gained many insightsinto the nature of problems associatedwith livestock development indifferent parts of the country. I joinedone of these groups as a residentveterinarian and was in for one-and-a-half years of unlearning — andrelearning.

Field work meant serious stuff withthe minimum of infrastructure, toolsand medicines. I had to depend onmy powers of observation, diagnosis

and ingenuity. I was working with asenior vet of the old school. Theyknew how to work in tough situations.He taught me many tricks that weweren’t taught in school. During myassociation with the BhagavatulaCharitable Trust (BCT), I made dailyvillage visits and also trained villagewomen as paravets, or animal healthworkers. The day began at 6 a.m.,when I got on my bicycle to go to ascheduled village. I had to do a lot ofunlearning and the people and thevillage became my real teachers. Itbecame clear to me within weeks thatlivestock diseases, low productivityand lowered reproductive capacitieswere just the external manifestationof real problems. Medicines were onlyan immediate short-term cure but gaveno long-term solutions. The realcauses lay with poor nutrition levels,disappearing common grazing lands,overgrazed lands, managementpractices unsuitable for their resourcebase, poor preventive health measuresand an unsuitable breeding policy.Many of the problems were created,or at least aggravated, by anindifferent government veterinary andanimal husbandry service and skeweddevelopment policies.

Injections,antibiotics,and socalled breed improvement through

artificial inseminationcould not address theissues of chronicm a l n o u r i s h m e n t ,seasonality of fodderavailability and therapid privatisation ofcommon grazing lands.Policies are implementedwithout any idea aboutexisting field constraintsand the people’straditional rearing andhealth practices. Thekey to solving theseproblems is organisedcommunity effort toaddress issues such as

controlled grazing, community fodderfarms and a mass preventivevaccination and dewormingprogramme. Women have to be rightup in front in these matters. So oftengovernment programmes tend toignore women, which means they missout on informing the key persons whocare for animals.

I also realised that I was notindispensable. People in the villageshad over the years developedsystems of coping and were not willingto accept the modern healer withoutlots of proof that our methods coulddo better. People preferred to use theirtime tested traditional systems ofhealing. It was only when they failedthat they came running to us vets.This was no gender issue. My malecolleagues encountered the sameexperiences. Why should we imaginethat people would suddenlyautomatically trust us when they wereprobably seeing us for the first timein their lives? This lack of trust led tocertain problems. Often local methodswere unable to deal with the problemand we had animals brought to us ontheir last legs. Now, if we treated theanimals and they died we would beblamed. What does one do in such asituation? To me it was not the dumbvillager who was to blame. I felt I had

Women para-vets from Bihar are trained to perform artificialinsemination

28 MANUSHI

to do a lot of education work so thatthe village people and I could cometo some workable arrangement. I hadto explain that I could not do anythingwhen they came to me at the lastminute. So I’d say,”By all means useyour own methods, but if the animaldoesn’t recover within 24 hours, or ifit shows signs of deterioration, youmust bring it to me. We have tocooperate with each other.”Meanwhile, I made an all out effort tocollect and study traditional practices.There were some that were positivelyharmful and some were very useful.Working with para-vets was a verygood way to spread this informationamongst the people.

New InsightsAllopathic western medicines are

a very expensive method of treatment.I often could not treat a patient as theowner was poor and couldn’t affordthe cost of the medicines. BCT had apolicy of charging the cost price ofthe medicine as we had no suppliesof subsidised medicine. I wasdetermined to find some alternativewhich was more cost-effective andwithin a poor person’s means. Istumbled upon homoeopathy. I beganwith a few cases, which showed superprogress. By the time I left BCT, I wastreating everything by means ofhomoeopathy, ranging from chronicand acute digestive problems, toreproductive problems and evenepidemic diseases such ashaemorrhagic septicaemia and blackquaxter. I have avoided surgicalintervention by treating the problemswith homoeopathy. The results wereexcellent, and so cheap—nothing everexceeded Rs 4 - 5 for the entiretreatment This was an excitingbreakthrough and today I have fullyincorporate it as part of the trainingprogramme for village-level animalhealth workers. Today they aretreating chronic cases of keralitis ofthe eye and corneal opacity withspecific homoeopathic drugs. What

would have cost at least Rs 100 nowcosts a mere Rs 5.

A vet training course must bestructured within an animal productionsystems context, and not incompartmentalised subjects divorcedfrom each other. In India, animals,crops, forests and people form aclosely interacting system; problemsneed to be addressed within thisframework, looking at poor producers’production goals, not at what isappropriate for scientists or urbanconsumers. Every vet needs to havea thorough understanding ofveterinary epidemiology, public healthand preventive medicine. Today,treatment is emphasised much morethan required. We tend to have a singledimensional approach to problemswithout addressing interlinkageswithin the system. We try to fit a multi-dimensional field problem into ournarrow mono-dimensionaldeterministic paradigm and the resultis confusion. Areas in whichrestructuring is required are:

Diseases in the field boil down tothree or four major problem areas. Avet comes into the field, expecting tofind all the diseases (bacterial, viral,parasitic) he or she was taught to curewith medicines and finds the work very

boring. There are few chances to usediagnostic procedures. There are noantibiotic sensitivity tests as textbooks taught us. The same routinecases occur over and over again:indigestion, bloat and so on.Remedies require long-term planningand working with the community. Noeasy medicinal solutions exist.

Most vets were brought up in arural environment. Nevertheless, alldevelop a superior, arrogant andpaternalistic attitude to “thoseilliterate villagers”, especially the poor.It is drilled into us from our first yearon that poor illiterate villagers aredumb and backward. What we reallyneed to learn is how to relate to themin order to understand how they makedecisions. Many supposedly“backward” practices have a certainlogic to them which we need tounderstand if we are to work forchange.

Women have traditionally playeda key role in the care and managementof animals in most animal rearingcommunities. The few exceptions arein certain semi-migratory and pastoralcommunities. If change has to beginat the level of the small farm, we needto work actively with the women. Thishas not been the case. Apart from

In BCT with a cured patient and its happy owner

No. 76 (May-June 1993)

some NGOs involved withdevelopment work and some state-level dairy cooperative programmes,there have been few initiativesinvolving women.

Women have to be involved atevery step of the programme.Technological innovations have to beseen in the context of their impact onwomen. For instance, on excessivelydegraded land, uncontrolled grazingis harmful. But outright banning ofgrazing will mean that women have tospend that much more time in grasscollection. What could be done is tofirst initiate community fodder farms(where grass is available), then somecontrolled grazing, and phase it in aplanned way with the activeinvolvement of women.

Traditional vs ModernWe are taught to condemn

traditional practices of healing asbeing unscientific and mumbo-jumbo.In the process, we not only alienatethe people, but lose out on studyingtraditional knowledge systems. Wealso fail to attain an insight into theexisting level of technology.Alienating and ridiculing localpeople’s practices, is the early majorerror in initiating any programme.Traditional knowledge needs to becollected, documented, scientificallyanalysed and clinically tested. It isonly by doing this that we candifferentiate between useful andharmful local practices. We can thenenrich the systems of healing byencouraging the useful anddiscarding the harmful, by carefullyexplaining how they can learn whichis which. The present highlycentralised system of veterinaryhealth services is pure madness in thelight of the widely scattered, poorlyconnected spatial distribution of ourvillages, with one animal husbandrycentre catering to several villages. Itis impossible to imagine that one vetwill be able to serve the health needsof over 25,000 animals located in 50

far flung villages as well as provideeducation input. It is also impossiblefor sick animals to travel seven oreight kms to the nearest clinic. Halfwould die on the way there. What isrequired is a network of village para-vets who would serve asmultipurpose workers: providing firstaid and essential curative services,regular vaccination, deworming andmonitoring disease patterns, mortalityand morbidity rates, which will feedback into a larger district-level diseasecontrol and surveillance programme.

They will also play the role ofmobilising/organising the communityaround community-level livestockprogrammes such as fodder farms,controls on grazing and protectingforests. They will be the best ones todisseminate new methods ofmanaging and rearing livestock as wellas documenting local knowledgesystems. The vets should superviseand coordinate these programmes,train field workers and also be incharge of a hospital which can attendto more critical cases.

I feel my current work is organisedprecisely in this way. I am attemptingto set up local community-levelinitiatives. The stumbling block is theveterinary establishment which feels

threatened by this kind ofdecentralised functioning and refusesto cooperate. Professionals alwaysget nervous and hostile when their“exclusive private knowledge” isdemystified and made accessible tothe common person. They are aspossessive as the traditional healer isabout his/her herbal remedies.

People tend to take total, extremepositions, without considering fieldrealities. They argue frompreconditioned mindsets: either it is acase of “I’m a traditionalist, let’s goback to nature, totally organic person.I will support everything traditional,”or “I’m a scientific person, I believe inprogress and the western system ofanalysis and development; I supporteverything that is western.” Manyhave very limited field experience. Ihave had close to five years experiencein the field, working amongstcommunities that have a great deal ofuseful traditional knowledge and atthe same time are groping for helpfrom other approaches. Myperspective arises out of the work Iam doing with marginal farmers andthe landless in the coastal districts ofAndhra Pradesh, with migratoryshepherds in Karnataka and AndhraPradesh and tribals in Andhra

Taking a class

30 MANUSHI

Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Rajasthan.Traditional systems of treatment atone level are a home-based skill.There are also specific families of“healers” who are paid by thevillagers for their services in bothcash and kind. They practice acombination of herbal medicine andmantras. People have a lot of faith inthis system, especially for problemsin what they regard as a “possessed”animal. Many practices can be shownto be beneficial, such as the use ofcertain roots and herbs for treatingwounds, diarrhoea,worms and mildrespiratory disorders.Others are downrightharmful anddangerous, such asapplying crushedstones to wounds tostop the bleeding,applying dung to skinrashes or wounds,putting crushed glassinto the animal’s eye totreat conjunctivitis andgiving fowls certainherbal concoctions totreat Raniket disease.

The same is true of traditionalmanagement practices. The beneficialones are those like tethering the cattlein the fields so that the dung fertilisesthe soil, penning the goat and sheepin the fields and letting them graze onthe stubble of crops. Other practicesare very harmful: for example, thepractice of not feeding the newborncalf the mother’s first milk, colostrum.This malpractice is common from northto south. A rare exception is the tribalsin Andhra Pradesh, for whom milk isnot an important commodity. Theyallow the calf to suckle the motherright from the time of birth. Peoplethrow away this wonderful source ofnatural antibodies because they thinkthe calf gets diarrhoea from it. I thinkthey see the first dung, calledmeconium, which is very liquidy, and

mistakenly believe this is diarrhoea.People are managing with limited

exhisting resources and levels oftechnology and end up usingmethods that are detrimental in thelong run. For example, grazing is theonly option today for many poorhouseholds. However, in reality,grazing on common land cannotsupport the grazing pressure.

Today there is no such thing as a“purely traditional system” in vethusbandry. This too has changedwith a changing resources base. But

regions for rearing goats, the onlyanimal that can survive withoutprivate land, on scarce fodder andwater and under the toughest ofcircumstances? I do not. I try tosupport them. Similarly, the westernforms of medicine and animalbreeding, management and rearing foronly one end product have limitedapplication for the bulk of the poorlivetstock owners in our country. Ouranimals play a “multi-purpose” rolein an integrated crop and animal

production system.Western technologicalmodels are not theanswer to our problems.

We have to evaluateand select the best ofeach system and adaptsome of the old methodsto meet new challenges.In short, we have toevolve some entirelynew combination of oldand new to meet ourneeds. Whatever be thesystem of treatment —traditional, ayurvedic,homoeopathic or

allopathic — basic good sanitation,hygiene, nutrition, housing, cleanwater and management are essentialpreconditions for good, healthy andsustainable livestock production.Treatment, if necessary, should be acombination of the best of eachsystem which is locally and easilyavailable, and cost effective withlimited side effects. But the goldenrule is: prevention is better than cure.

Today, poor tribals are as ex-ploited by the vet and the ‘modern’technologies, as they are by tradi-tional healers.they are being deniedaccess to adequate information thatwould enable them to make an in-formed choice. A lot of“demystification” of both systemsneeds to be done. As scientificallythinking human beings, we cannot

Pregnancy diagnosis on a buffalo in an Andhra village

there have been very few useful localdevelopments to address the newproblems that have arisen with thebreakdown of traditional practices, theonslaught of the technologiesdeveloped in the West and the wholenew interaction with external marketforces.

The responses are “survivalresponses”, looking to meetimmediate needs without thinkingabout the future. The poorest then getcaught in this vicious cycle of beingforced to over-extract from theirdiminishing resource base (which hasalready been gobbled up by theindustialist, the urban rich and so on)in order to survive, therebyprecipitating ecological disastersituations. Can you really blame thepoor landless labourer in the arid

No. 76 (May-June 1993)

and should not blindly support rec-ommendations without demonstra-tions that the methods work in thefields of the actual farmers.

In the field, I never onceexperienced the kinds of prejudicesand hurdles that I did from my malecolleagues and professors. Thisseemed to be a wholly urban and ruralmiddle class phenomenon. Curiosity,yes, friendliness, yes, but never oncedid they make me feel that I was anincompetent woman vet, incompetentto address the complex web ofproblems. There werethe usual questionsabout whether I wasmarried or single, hadchildren and aboutwhere I came from.They were, I think,relieved to havesomeone who waswilling to discuss theirproblems with them.The women likedhaving a woman vetaround. I was prettycomfortable workingwith and in the midstof both men andwomen.

I also spent twoyears in the US getting postgraduation training. It furthered mydesire to come home and work. It wasalmost like telling the HAUestablishment, “You thought I wasn’tgood enough! Well, I even made it onmy own, with a university fellowshipto that ‘success of all successes’ —doing post graduate studies in USA.”The reactions on my return were,“You actually returned home to Indiaafter being in the US?” and “Back tothose godforsaken places?”

The average vet student didn’tvoluntarily opt for veterinary science.It was a choice by default, after notmaking it to medical college,engineering or dentistry. The majoritywere pretty unenthusiastic about theprofession.

They had a big complex about theprofession. They themselves felt thatthis was an “inferior” profession, notat par with doctors’ or administrativeofficers’. It doesn’t have the desiredstatus or pay. Though veterinaryscience should be an importantprofession in this country of 400million animals, it is not.

I feel that our caste system has arole to play here. After all, isn’t it onlythe so-called ‘outcaste’ who dealswith animal carcasses, dung, dirt andso on?

immunology and is now working as aresearch scientist in the BharatiyaAgro Industrial Foundation’s VaccineProduction Centre. Nitya has becomean excellent surgeon, but continuesher involvement with rural and urbanlivestock development and animalwelfare work. We hope to join forcessome day to provide an alternativeveterinary and animal production ser-vice team. Dr Usha, our adviser incollege who has been our rock ofGibraltar, was in the Ministry of Agri-culture as a deputy director and has

now become head ofthe department of vet-erinary epidemiologyin HAU.

There are now atleast 1,500 womenvets in India and anorganisation calledthe IndianAssociation of LadyVeterinarians. In thesouth, especially instates such as TamilNadu and Kerala,women make up atleast 50 percent ofeach veterinarycollege class. They

are involved in a wide range ofservices, from research and privatepractice to government service andteaching.

We women can play an importantrole in influencing the profession tobecome more sensitive not only toissues relating to animal husbandrybut gender issues as well. We are thekey factor in this link between ruralwomen, their livestock and theprofession. We have to play a far moreactive role, not only in gendersensitising our professionalcolleagues, but also in helping ourprofession to look at ways in which itcan become more meaningful topeople and more creative forourselves.

Pregnancy diagnosis on a buffalo in an Andhra village

Regrettably, vets have no respector pride in their profession either.They themselves feel that what theyare doing is not “as good as.....” Theyconstantly carry this chip on theirshoulders and have to repeat tothemselves and others that, “We arejust as good as medicos.” Incidentally,another advantage that most womenwho opt for veterinary science haveis that they do so voluntarily, and Iwould imagine consequently have amore positive attitude to theprofession.The Pioneers Lead the Way

My women colleagues went theirown way. Quite by chance, many ofus ended up working in projects thathad a development basis to them.Namrata specialised in veterinary