IWN Report — Tuesday, 8 September 2026
India’s environment minister Bhupender Yadav used a visit to a Haryana vulture breeding centre recently to make a national case: the country needs more places where vultures can feed, breed and travel without meeting a poisoned carcass. On 6 September, Yadav inaugurated a workshop in Panchkula titled ‘From Crisis to Recovery – Conserving India’s Vultures’, calling for expanded Vulture Safe Zones across the country.
The workshop was organised jointly by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change (MoEFCC), the Central Zoo Authority (CZA), the Haryana Forest Department and the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS), which jointly runs the Jatayu Conservation Breeding Centre (JCBC) in Pinjore with the state government. Haryana’s forest and wildlife minister, Rao Narbir Singh, also addressed the gathering.
Vultures are India’s original clean-up crew. A flock can strip a carcass in minutes, recycling nutrients and slowing the spread of disease through livestock and wild herds alike. Since the 1990s, the country’s vulture population has collapsed, driven largely by a veterinary painkiller that entered the food chain: vultures that fed on the carcasses of treated livestock were poisoned by drug residue in the meat.
India is home to nine species of vulture, resident and migratory: White-rumped, Long-billed, Slender-billed, Red-headed, Egyptian, Himalayan Griffon, Eurasian Griffon, Cinereous and Bearded. Three of the hardest-hit — White-rumped, Long-billed and Slender-billed — are the focus of the breeding programme at JCBC.
The Numbers
The centre’s most recent year gives some sense of scale. Between 2025 and 2026, JCBC housed 356 vultures and bred 35 chicks. It released or contributed 87 birds to reintroduction programmes, transferred 90 more to other conservation-breeding institutions, and trained 1,222 people from 22 institutions.
Yadav framed the visit as part of a wider approach that, he said, extends to Big Cats, the Sloth Bear, the Great Indian Bustard, river dolphins, the Gharial and the Wild Water Buffalo as much as to vultures. For vultures specifically, he wants more Vulture Safe Zones: places built on vulture-safe veterinary practices, a reliable and uncontaminated food supply, and stronger technical capacity. He appealed directly to veterinary professionals, livestock owners and local administrations to help manage carcasses safely.
Rao Narbir Singh made a related point about how to judge the programme’s success. Chick counts matter less, he said, than whether the centre is building genetically healthy populations, generating scientific knowledge and training people who can carry that knowledge into the field.
The workshop closed with the release of a coffee-table book, Story of Jatayu: Saving India’s Vulture, tracing the species’ decline and the breeding programme built to reverse it, alongside prizes for a drawing and photography competition on vulture conservation held earlier in the year.
Sources: Press Information Bureau (PIB), via Tripura Star News