“Bharat’s Vulture Conservation Saved The Species. So Why Aren’t The Birds Back?”, Swarajya, 14 Oct 2026.
“Anyone who grew up in an Indian village or a small town before the 2000s knows the sound before the sight. A heavy, leathery rush of wings, then the squabbling. A buffalo dies behind the settlement, and within the hour there is nothing but a clean white skeleton. No municipality was called. No truck arrived. No fee was paid.
We had, without ever designing it, the most efficient waste disposal system in the world, and it worked for free.
Then one day it stopped.
In the space of about ten years, between the early 1990s and the early 2000s, ninety-nine out of every hundred white-rumped vultures in this country died. It is the fastest collapse of any bird species ever recorded anywhere on earth, faster than the passenger pigeon and faster than the dodo.
When the vultures went, the carcasses did not. Thirty million livestock die in India every year, and what a flock of birds used to strip clean in an hour now lay in the open for days. Feral dogs moved into that vacancy in enormous numbers, and rabies vaccine sales began climbing sharply from 1996 onwards. Water sources near dumping grounds deteriorated as rotting carcasses leached into them……….”
Read the full article at Swarajya.
