This is the unusual story of a quiet, unassuming woman who won the Padma Shri in 2022 for one of the more remarkable reasons imaginable: she saved and resurrected a breed of indigenous cattle, the Vechur cow. Dr. Sosamma Iype’s story is located at the heart of India’s tussle to industrialise rapidly while seeking to preserve its sublime biodiversity, at a time when the former was fashionable and the latter was not.
Agrarian transformations, erasure of breeds
Steeped in abject poverty and food scarcity at the time of Independence, India had to lay the foundations of a vigorous industry, which would catapult us into the future, and simultaneously ensure that the most basic necessities of our citizens were met. Exacerbating our woes was the fact that the major bulk of our populace subsisted solely on agriculture and animal husbandry, thus making their modernisation vital. Establishing a host of agricultural universities soon after Independence, we embarked on the quest to modernise our farming and livestock rearing practices, hoping to retrieve them from the depths of antiquity. And though our agricultural output soared with the advent of the Green Revolution and dairy production spiked with the onset of the White Revolution, these miraculous transformations also came at a pernicious cost. They reduced indigenous breeds such as the Vechur cow to the brink of extinction.
