GONALL: When a man or woman of this village in Sindhanur taluk of Karnataka has a subliminal conversation with the divine, cattle invariably figure in it. When forgiveness is sought or a prayer is rendered, a bull is offered to the Hanuman temple that stands at the entrance of the village.
The temple bull so gifted is then revered by all and allowed into any field to browse. Everyone feeds him.
But this drought has been hard on the sacred bull of Gonall. Nobody can afford fodder any more and villagers had begun to sell their cattle at the Monday market at throwaway prices. One man, Sharanabasu sold seven heads -- two bulls and five cows -- for Rs 80,000.
“These are bad times,” he said, sitting on a charpoy outside his home. “The two bulls would have otherwise gone for Rs 50,000."
The temple bull was not sold though. “They would have slaughtered him,” said another villager Lingappa.
Instead, the village raised money and sent him to the goshala in Raichur. Goshalas have to be paid up to Rs 3,000 plus a cartful of fodder for each animal sent for drought-time lodging.
For farmers who don’t want to sell out on their cattle, fodder banks are an option. One villager, Sudhakar said he didn’t want to give up on his cows and therefore trekked to a village where he’d heard there’s a fodder bank. But he was not welcome. “The villagers chased me away saying there is no such bank,” Sudhakar said.
So he took his cows to a goshala. There they asked him to give them a tractor load of fodder is his cattle were to be given board and lodge. ”If I had fodder, I’d have kept them,” said Sudhakar.
The goshala in Raichur is spacious and shaded, and a towering stack of hay stands by the gate. Its patrons are wealthy. One of the goshala staffer said businessmen buy cows from the cattle market and lodge them here, paying upwards of Rs 10,000 for their upkeep. It’s a religious thing with them. These rich cattle occupy the goshala stalls and poorer farmers are turned away.
Sharanabasu, the man who sold all his cattle, a stroke of bad luck forced him to give up on his cows. He had piled up his straw out in the sun. It turned brittle and a carelessly tossed beedi set the stack on fire.
“Everything burned down,” Sharanabasu said. “The stack was worth Rs 15,000 and I couldn’t afford to buy more.”
Sharanabasu’s house opens onto the village square where well-tended cows sit around with shiny bells. Was he sad to lose his cattle? “It was either them or my family,” he. “I have to think of six people in my home.” So what happens when the rains come and the fields have to be tilled? Sharanabasu hopes to rent a tractor. It will cost him about Rs 1,000 per acre.
Letting go of cattle is a difficult decision to make in this all-encompassing drought. Should they be soled? Lingappa sent his cow to the goshala in Raichur. “She has given us milk and ghee for years and several calves. How could I send her to a slaughterhouse,” he asks.
It can be a difficult parting. A month after Lingappa sent his cow to the goshala, he went back to see how she was doing. But she wasn’t there any more. They had shifted her to the goshala in Sindhanur. That left Lingappa a worried man. Sindhanur was where 58 cows died of food poisoning three years ago.
Another option is to let the cattle loose to forage on their own, or just wander away looking for water. “Sometimes you find your cow dead in a field. They die of thirst. Or someone runs over them on the highway,” said Lingappa.