People's Democracy

THE All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS) and All India Agricultural Workers Union (AIAWU) have extended support to the demand of the Veterinary Services Federation of India for an amendment to the Indian Veterinary Council Act 1984. The situation today is that there are not enough degree holders to man all the veterinary service centres in the country and therefore diploma holders are being used to man them. As such, the services of these diploma holders cannot be dispensed with. However, the act of 1984 contradicts the legitimate status of registered medical practitioners (RMP) these diploma holders enjoy because of the act of 1947. The amendments the federation is demanding are needed to prevent the government from using the 1984 act for ending the RMP status of these veterinary practitioners.

It is to be noted that a number of state governments, including those of Maharashtra, Haryana and UP, have expressed their inability to dispense with the services of diploma holders for want of qualified degree holders. Yet the centre is not keen on having a piece of legislation that fits in with the ground reality and may regulate the veterinary services.

The AIKS-AIAWU protest is also based on the fact that this way the centre is trying to interfere in what is essentially a state matter. This will result in chaos in a service that helps the poor who raise ducks, chicks, pigs, sheep and cattle and who can ill afford private veterinary treatment. Moreover, in a country with a high pressure on land, animal husbandry is an important source of subsistence, and any attack on it means a threat to the very capacity of our rural population to survive.

The AIKS and AIAWU also apprehend that the attempt to keep this law on the statute book is part of the process of dismantling the support structures India had evolved over five decades since independence. These include the public distribution system, the procurement machinery, input subsidies and the like, and allowed our rural small producers to survive. But the successive central governments have sought to destroy these very structures in order to open up our economy to five or six multinationals at the cost of 78 per cent of the Indian population.

This will not be tolerated, the AIAWU and AIKS have warned. They said they would join the Veterinary Services Federation of India in its just struggle till victory. The two organisations will also help the federation to collect lakhs of signatures in support of its just demands.

On June 10, AIAWU joint secretary Suneet Chopra and AIKS joint secretary N K Shukla joined a large dharna outside the Indian Veterinary Council premises in Karol Bagh, New Delhi. The dharna was staged in a bid to protect the livelihood of 80,000 RMP veterinary personnel and the health of an industry worth Rs 500 crore a day. Others to address the dharna included former animal husbandry minister Raghuvansh Prasad Singh, the federation’s chairman Sandeep Rana and its general secretary Narayan Joshi.