Livestock Policy making a difference - Case Of Orissa

While the Orissa assembly accorded the approval to the livestock policy in Oct 2002, the implementation started from year 2003-2004.

“There has been a ‘Sea change in the Animal Husbandry Department (AHD)’ is last few years. The Livestock policy has drawn attention to some crucial aspects of the sector like Human Institutional Development, Animal Health and Breeding aspects and some attention is now paid to developing small animal production – hitherto neglected by AHD”, opined the Director, AHD, Orissa.  

The Management board of  South Asia Pro-Poor Livestock Policy Programme. proposed a light assessment  addressing issues such as: - to what extent has the Policy been implemented, -what are the key strengths, -what are the problems that are being faced in implementation etc The assessment should ideally provide valuable insight, experiences and learning’s, which can be useful inputs to the other policy makers in States as in  Central Government.

The assessment reveals that one of the major impacts of the Livestock Policy in Orissa has been the developing of “community linked workers’ to improve the accessibility of livestock services. The training facilities for Para-vets are being strengthened along with monitoring and supervision of their working. Another interesting development has been the introduction of charging the users for health and breeding services. Part of the funds generated through service charges are  used for capacity building of the staff, training of farmers, and developing and maintaining of infrastructure for providing services that handles training and orientation programmes for AHD.

Some of the other areas that have been impacted positively through Policy recommendations are Human resource development, Development of institutions, Adoption of e- reporting by Animal Health Department and substantial improvement in Livestock production.

Discussions with the Director and other senior officers regarding the process of policy implementation revealed that  a formal process or  a person or group   assigned the responsibility would give better results,  a mix of senior / elderly officers and junior / young officers of related organizations should be involved in the Policy formulations process, the  policy process should not be very lengthy, policy document should be in simple and easy to understand language and the policy should emphasize on making livestock research need based and supportive of development.

The findings reveal a lot of insights and valid lessons to learn from the experiences, for all those States in the process of developing a Livestock Policy.

The above mentioned study can be accessed from the Information Hub through the following link: #

Contributed by - Coordination Team