Deplorable conditions can be seen at Hyderabad’s private slaughter house with the Hyderabad Municipal Corporation or the district administration unable to check it.

Neither of the authorities forces the meat sellers to shift to modern slaughter houses — built as part of a larger cattle colony project — on the outskirts of the city.

The private slaughter house facility is located on the right bank of the Phulelli canal, a source of drinking water for city dwellers. The canal gets polluted with waste matter and municipal wastewater. No veterinary doctor from the Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (HMC) or livestock department is deputed to certify the health status of the animals slaughtered.

Suet, rendered from the beef of slaughtered cows and buffaloes, or their blood, is sold to buyers for soap manufacturing, animal feed etc. The suet is boiled on the canal bank, although the Sindh Environmental Protection Agency (SEPA) has been raising serious concern over this practice, and has been constantly writing to the administration; it has all been to no avail.

The Cattle Colony, run by the HMC, needs to be made fully operational. It requires an internal road network, proper electricity supply and sewerage disposal

The meat gets exposed to germs, dust and environmental pollution. The Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (HMC) charges a nominal amount per goat, buffalo, ox or cow. Around 150 to 200 animals are slaughtered in two shifts in a day.

Cattle pens located there have not shifted to the cattle colony that stretches over 217-acres off the Tando Mohammad Khan road. While some cattle pen owners shifted their animals to the colony during the initial phase of the project, the majority of them, however, are either reluctant, or flatly refuse, to relocate their pens for one reason or the other. The authorities seem least interested in the shifting of animals.

Often weak, unhealthy, buffaloes and calf are slaughtered without official verification of the state of their health. A senior veterinary doctor, Dr Mubarak Jatoi says an animal’s health needs to be checked before slaughtering but authorities are not concerned.

“There is a dire need to check whether buffaloes with milk production efficiency, or the ones fit for breeding, are being slaughtered. The pre and post slaughtering examination of animals is essential, as well. Each animal fit for slaughtering has to be tagged”, he says.

The slaughter house at the cattle colony is a modernised one. With the requisite equipment/machinery, separate spaces are available for hand slaughtering, washing, cutting of meat and the disposal of offal and other waste matter.

Animals can stay in a separate space and walk upstairs, to the slaughter area, through a ramp — itself a yardstick for checking the status of an animal’s health. Only a healthy animal can walk upstairs on that long ramp.

The Cattle Colony, run by the HMC, however also needs to be made fully operational. It requires an internal road network, proper electricity supply and sewerage disposal. The colony, spread over a vast area, is an ideal place for cattle farming.

Currently, pens have been set up on 300 plots — out of 950 plots — in A and B categories with around 9,000 buffaloes. Close to 100,000 litres of milk are supplied by the cattle colony to Hyderabad, its adjoining districts and even Karachi. Milk is also supplied by pens that dot the city.

The HMC’s deputy director cattle colony, Dr Arif Jahejo, believes that if the colony is made fully functional, the colony could provide all required facilities to those interested in keeping their cattle there.

He outlined work, involving an expenditure of Rs18m, for making the slaughter house fully functional. He says the colony also has a provision for a weekly and annual cattle bazaar and fodder market.

Livestock department officers believe that space for the movement of cattle needs to be made available in the colony as the animals’ mobility is highly restricted in the pens. They also don’t get enough drinking water and green fodder.

Interestingly, official sources say that while the existing cattle colony awaits its full-fledged operations, three more cattle colonies are being planned in three cities by the Sindh government under its Annual Development Programme 2016-17.

Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, October 17th, 2016