Adapted for HerConversation from her policy brief on veterinary service delivery for nomadic and semi nomadic pastoral communities.
Across India, nomadic and semi nomadic pastoral communities have long sustained their livelihoods through mobility, shaping their lives around seasonal movement, traditional grazing routes, changing landscapes, and the close relationship between people, animals, and land. For these communities, livestock is not merely an economic asset, but the foundation of food security, household income, savings, cultural identity, and generational wealth.
India’s veterinary service delivery system, however, remains largely built around a settled model of rural life, with veterinary hospitals, dispensaries, vaccination drives, documentation systems, and extension services almost exclusively tied to fixed locations and administrative boundaries. While this infrastructure serves agricultural populations living near villages, towns, or district centers, it leaves mobile pastoralists who move with their herds for months at a time physically and structurally excluded from essential care. When veterinary care remains stationary while communities move, pastoralists are effectively locked out of vital support systems, even when those services technically exist on paper.
Pastoralism depends fundamentally on movement, as herders travel across distinct ecological zones, administrative districts, and state borders in search of fodder, water, and seasonal grazing opportunities. A veterinary dispensary in a fixed location cannot adequately serve a herd that is hundreds of kilometers away on a migratory route. Vaccination drives frequently miss migratory animals, emergency care arrives too late or not at all, and health records issued in one district are rarely recognized in another. These operational gaps leave pastoralists exceptionally vulnerable to disease outbreaks while also exposing animals to prolonged illness and preventable suffering that timely veterinary intervention could often avert.
A single infection spreading through a herd can destroy years of labor and savings, destabilizing household food security, increasing debt, disrupting children’s education, and worsening overall family stability. Women in pastoral households bear a significant share of this vulnerability. Even when they are not the formal owners of livestock, women routinely manage daily animal care, dairy work, household nutrition, and the fallout of income loss, meaning that the systemic failure to reach pastoral communities ripples across the entire household.
Accessible veterinary care extends far beyond treating individual sick animals. It is directly linked to vaccination networks, disease surveillance, livestock insurance, credit access, financial compensation, and government welfare schemes. Many of these formal safety nets require specific documentation, such as veterinary certificates, vaccination records, or postmortem reports issued by state officers. For mobile pastoralists, obtaining these documents is extremely difficult if the nearest veterinary office lies far from their seasonal migration route, leaving paperwork unfinished and pastoralists locked out of institutional financial protection simply because their way of life does not conform to the administrative assumptions of the state. Limited access to trained veterinary care also has important implications for animal welfare. Conditions that could have been treated early often become prolonged, and preventable pain and suffering become an accepted consequence of geography rather than an unavoidable reality.
There is also a critical public health dimension to this exclusion. When herders cannot access trained veterinary support, they are often forced to rely on informal treatment methods or unregulated medicines, increasing the risks of ineffective disease management and antibiotic misuse. Strengthening veterinary access for pastoral communities is therefore not only a matter of welfare and equity, but also a crucial requirement for livestock productivity, public health, and broader disease prevention.
India does not need to build an entirely new veterinary infrastructure to address this challenge. Veterinary facilities, mobile veterinary units, livestock welfare schemes, and rural development mechanisms already exist. What is needed is a redesign of service delivery so that it reflects the mobility of pastoral life through a practical, route based model of care. Instead of tying services solely to fixed administrative blocks or districts, animal husbandry departments could map traditional migration routes and plan service delivery around them, shifting the focus from expecting herders to visit fixed clinics to ensuring care follows the movement of the herd.
This begins with formally identifying and mapping pastoral migration corridors and recognizing them as primary service areas rather than administrative anomalies. Such mapping should incorporate seasonal halt points, grazing clusters, water sources, and key transit villages. Existing mobile veterinary units can then be strategically aligned with these mapped routes and scheduled according to migration calendars rather than functioning solely on a district bound or request driven basis.
A route based system would also benefit from localized support mechanisms, portable documentation, and stronger coordination across state boundaries. Villages along pastoral corridors can serve as predictable support nodes where vaccines, medicines, first response supplies, and seasonal veterinary camps are made available during migration periods without requiring permanent large scale facilities. To bridge the persistent trust gap between government institutions and pastoral communities, young people from these communities should be trained and certified as community animal health workers. With an intimate understanding of grazing routes, local breeds, and seasonal risks, trained youth can provide immediate first aid, assist in vaccination drives, maintain contact with veterinary officers, and facilitate early disease reporting. Veterinary records, health certificates, and scheme entitlements must also become fully portable across district and state boundaries so that administrative borders do not erase a herd's medical history or eligibility for support. Since pastoral routes regularly cross state lines while veterinary governance remains divided by jurisdiction, common interstate protocols are equally essential to ensure continuity of care.
Pastoral communities are often described as hard to reach, but that framing overlooks the real issue. These communities are not unreachable. Public systems have simply not been designed around the realities of their movement. Mobility is not a problem to be corrected, but a rational and time tested livelihood strategy shaped by ecology, climate, land availability, and generations of specialized knowledge. When public systems cater exclusively to settled populations, mobile communities become invisible, undermining their livelihood security, financial protection, and health outcomes while leaving a significant portion of the nation's livestock outside formal disease surveillance networks. Designing veterinary services that move with pastoralists is therefore not simply about improving service delivery. It is about recognizing pastoralism as a legitimate way of life, protecting both people and animals who depend on one another, and ensuring that essential public systems are built around the realities of those they are meant to serve. Route based planning, portable documentation, and community led animal health networks offer practical reforms that can strengthen livelihoods, improve animal welfare, enhance disease surveillance, and build a more inclusive and resilient livestock economy.
