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Indian vultures face extinction

K. Venkateswarlu

HYDERABAD: Indian vultures in the wild could be extinct within a decade in the absence of measures to check the retail sale of diclofenac, the livestock drug that triggered their decline, a new study has warned.

BirdLife International, a global partnership of conservation organisations, quotes the study published in the Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society to drive home the point that the drug continues to kill vultures, after entering its food chain, despite a ban put in place in 2006 on its manufacture.

The study shows that the white-rumped vulture, Gyps bengalensis, is in dire straits with only one thousandth of the 1992 population of the birds remaining. Its population has been dropping by more than 40 per cent a year and their numbers could now be down to 11,000 from tens of millions in the 1980s.

The numbers of Indian G. indicus and the slender-billed vulture, G. tenuirostris together, too have fallen by almost 97 per cent in the same period: their population has dwindled to 45,000 and 1,000 respectively.

The decline of the vulture population in India is largely traced to their feeding on livestock carcasses bearing traces of diclofenac.Though the veterinary form, used as an anti-inflammatory drug for livestock, was outlawed two years ago, it remains widely available.

“Efforts must be redoubled to remove diclofenac from the vultures’ food supply and to protect and breed a viable population in captivity,” says lead author Dr. Vibhu Prakash of the BNHS, the BirdLife partner in India, in his paper.

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