Gaushalas
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Gaushalas
01/20/2025
Numbers
307 million. This is the current number of bovines or “cattle stocks” in India, including native breeds, Jerseys, and water buffaloes. Sustaining the largest herd of bovines in the world, India is the world’s top milk producer, accounting for 22% of global production. Despite having no official “beef industry,” with most Indian states having full or partial bans on the slaughter, sale, and/or the consumption of beef, in 2023 India ranked as the second highest beef exporter globally, trailing only Brazil. Moreover, while India’s total beef production was approximately 4.55 MMT (million metric tons), only 1.5 MMT (33%) of this supply was exported, meaning that over 65% was consumed domestically. Given this massive number of bovines ostensibly exploited exclusively for dairy, whose lifespans far exceed their lactating years, one must ultimately accept Yamini Narayanan’s conclusion that “[i]t is impossible to be the world’s largest dairy farm without being among the world’s biggest bovine slaughterhouses” (2023, 44). Overall, signs point to large, well-established, legal and illegal bovine trafficking and slaughter operations. With the increasing demand for dairy products in India and elsewhere, an ongoing critical issue for Indian bovines is what happens to them once they cease to be—while living—economically profitable.
History
In ancient India, some bovines were regarded as “sacred,” yet this label likely emerged from bovines’ indispensability as sources of sustenance for human welfare. Early Hindu dharma literature celebrates the ritual value of the native cow, particularly in the form of the purificatory efficacy ascribed to the pañcagavya, the five products of the cow—urine, dung, milk, curds, and ghee. Cow’s milk in particular is extolled as not only essential for ritual purposes but also as an important food source. The nutritional value of milk is corroborated by prescriptions in classical medical texts, such as in the earliest and most heavily-referenced authority on Āyurveda, the Caraka Saṃhitā (ca. first century CE). Regardless of the contested origin and history of the sacred cow motif (Jha 2002), care and “protection” of cows in gaushalas (“cow shelters”) has existed in some form for centuries. However, over the past 150 years, gaushalas and cow protection initiatives have gained increased visibility and significance due to various social, economic, and nationalist endeavors (Narayanan 2023; Scholten 2010), with “cow protection” frequently used as a pretext for intra-human violence.
Gaushalas Today
According to the Ministry of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying of the Government of India, as of July 2023 there are 7,676 gaushalas in the country. A March 2023 report from public policy institute NITI Aayog extends a more modest estimate of “above 5000” (only 1837 are recognized by the Animal Welfare Board of India) with statistics complicated by the fact that “[g]aushalas are also known by names like pinjrapole, kanji house, gauvatika etc.” Despite the differences in titles, “[a]ccording to the Bureau of Indian Standards a gaushala is a protective shelter, abode, or sanctuary for cows, set up to improve their health and life, sell pure milk and cow products, conserve germplasm, and stop animal cruelty (BIS, 1987).” Generally speaking, gaushalas are shelters for cows rather than all animals, and even among bovines many “foreign” and “casteized” breeds—especially water buffalo, who are exploited for the majority of beef and dairy in India—are implicitly and explicitly forbidden (Narayanan 2018).
NITI Aayog divides gaushalas into four main categories (cf. Lodrick 1981; Sharma et al. 2020):
(1) Government run gaushalas
(2) Privately run gaushalas for animal rescue
(3) Privately run gaushalas for conservation of native breeds
(4) Gaushalas run by religious institutions
The advertised objective of all gaushalas is to give cows a place to live out their lives in comfort and safety once they are no longer able to “provide” humans with milk. However, living conditions in gaushalas vary tremendously, with recent accounts (Dave 2017; Narayanan 2023; Sharma et al. 2020) clearly problematize the “protection” slogan that is more often palpable in rhetoric than in practice.
Shelter or Industry?
While gaushalas may or may not monetize their animals by selling milk, hides, dung, or urine, NITI Aayog observes that in religiously run gaushalas, “the sale of milk is the main source of revenue for these gaushalas and therefore [they] operate similar to dairy farms.” It is noteworthy—and perhaps paradoxical—that shelters for cows retired from the dairy industry often sustain themselves by raising and exploiting younger cows for milk production. This blurs the line between a shelter and a dairy farm. However, this may not be seen as contradictory, given that dairying—despite the numerous harms it entails beyond milking, often including slaughter—continues to be perceived as a benign practice from which cows supposedly do not require “protection.”
Even with hypothetical economic sustainability, the sheer scale of the problem is staggering. For instance, Pathmeda in Rajasthan, India’s largest gaushala, houses over 20,000 animals, yet most gaushalas manage only a few hundred. So while beef consumption and production dominate India’s gastropolitical debates, the core issue remains the mass breeding of cows for dairy and its associated industries and political agendas.
Jonathan Dickstein, Assistant Professor at Arihanta Institute, completed his PhD in Religious Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara. He specializes in South Asian Religions, Animals and Religion, and Comparative Ethics. His current work focuses on Jainism and contemporary ecological issues, extending into Critical Animal Studies, Food Studies, and Diaspora Studies.
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