Jaipur: After uproar over mass death of cows at a shelter near Jaipur, the state government has swung into action. Chief Minister Vasundhara Raje tweeted that strict action would be taken against the officers responsible.
She has also assured that she would visit the shelter soon and has ordered a high-level inquiry. Two senior officials have been already suspended for dereliction of duty.
Animal husbandry minister Prabhu Lal Saini himself personally attended cows and said, “I am a farmer and a cattle rearer, cows who were not eating I have fed them, have given water to the cows, one’s who were lying down I have made them sit up.”,” he said.
Since more than 250 contractual workers at the Hingonia cow shelter went on strike last month to demand that they be paid, their neglected stalls have turned into death traps. No one has cleaned the stalls where the animals are kept or fed them, many have starved to death, their hooves stuck in slush caused by heavy rain and cow dung.
There is no official count of the number of cows that have died, but volunteers who have arrived to help clean the sheds say they have taken out 90 carcasses in the last two days and there are many more dead cows. The shelter houses about 8,000 cows. Government vet Dr Devendra Kumar Yadav confirmed that most of the cows have died from starvation not disease.
“The main reason is that workers here have not been paid since May and with no labour how do you expect me to sort out the problem?” said Bhagwat Singh Dewal, chairman of the shelter, which has an yearly budget of 20 crore. The salaries were held up because of a dispute between the Jaipur Municipal Corporation and the firm through which the workers are hired to clean the cow sheds and feed the animals.
Meanwhile, the Congress hit the streets with a “gau raksha rally”. “Where are the cow vigilante groups and the gau rakshaks, why don’t they go and pull out cows stuck in the mud and slush as our workers are doing,” the Congress spokesperson said.
Rajasthan High Court has directed the Anti-Corruption Bureau to give a report by August 10 on why the salaries of the contract workers were stopped despite the civic body having a budget of Rs. 20 crores.
