India Banned Veterinary Diclofenac in 2006, Fledged 396 Captive-Bred Vultures by 2019 and Has Released Birds From Its Breeding Centres Since 2020

India banned veterinary diclofenac, a painkiller given to cattle, in August 2006, because the vultures that ate the carcasses were dying of kidney failure. Since then the country has opened eight breeding centres, which together held 731 vultures in 2019 and 2020, and the Bombay Natural History Society (BNHS) said on 5 September 2026 that it has released about 134 captive-bred birds since 2020.

The wild population started from a very low base. The Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change’s action plan for 2020 to 2025 puts the three common resident species at about 40 million birds (4 crore) in the 1980s and says 99 per cent of them were gone by 2007.

A crash first counted at Keoladeo

Vibhu Prakash of the BNHS counted 353 vulture nesting pairs at Keoladeo National Park in 1984, according to a Virginia Quarterly Review account by Meera Subramanian. When he returned in 1996 the number was less than half of that, and by 1999 no pairs were left. The Keoladeo wetland at Bharatpur is where the Nature paper of 2004 says a decline of more than 95 per cent was first noticed.

Prakash and eight co-authors then measured the loss across the country. They drove more than 6,000 km of survey roads in 2000 and compared the counts with those of 1990 to 1993. The white-backed and long-billed vultures had fallen by more than 92 per cent overall, and the fall was the same inside protected areas as outside them. In that 2003 paper the authors suggested an epidemic disease as a possible cause.

A second paper, by Rhys Green and colleagues in the Journal of Applied Ecology, put the annual decline of the two species at 22 to 50 per cent between 2000 and 2003. The action plan later gave final figures for the survey series: the white-backed vulture (also called the white-rumped, and Oriental white-backed in older papers) fell by more than 99.9 per cent between 1992 and 2007, and the long-billed and slender-billed together fell by 96.8 per cent. For the red-headed vulture the plan gives 91 per cent, with the period stated as 1990 to 2007 in its summary and 1991 to 2003 in its main text.

The finding that named diclofenac

The cause was identified in Pakistan. A team led by Lindsay Oaks of Washington State University worked with the Peregrine Fund’s Asian Vulture Crisis Project and the Ornithological Society of Pakistan at 16 white-backed vulture colonies in three districts of Pakistan, covering more than 2,400 active nests. Between 2000 and 2002 they examined 259 dead adult and subadult birds, and 219 of them (85 per cent) had the urate deposits on their organs that mark visceral gout, a condition that follows kidney failure.

The team tested for lead, mercury, bird flu, pesticides and other poisons and found nothing that explained it. They then surveyed 74 veterinarians and drug sellers to find a drug that was both harmful to kidneys and absorbed by mouth, and diclofenac was the only one. Diclofenac residues turned up in the kidneys of all 25 vultures that died of renal failure and in none of the 13 that died of other causes.

Feeding trials followed. Vultures fed meat from treated buffalo and goats received a range of doses. Some at the lowest doses survived, but all ten that received 0.8 to 1.0 mg per kg of body weight died of renal failure. Oaks and his co-authors proposed that residues of veterinary diclofenac were responsible for the white-backed decline.

Green’s team showed that very little contaminated meat was needed. Their simulation model found that diclofenac in between 1 in 130 and 1 in 760 carcasses could produce the observed declines. They estimated that diclofenac explained between 71 and 100 per cent of the excess deaths. India’s own liver samples from cattle carcasses, taken in 2004 and 2005, showed contamination at a level high enough to have caused the crash, the action plan reports.

The ban, the vial limit and the replacement drug

The Drugs Controller General of India banned the use, sale and manufacture of veterinary diclofenac in August 2006 and gave three months to implement the ban. The action plan says the ban was gazetted in 2008 as notification GSR 499 (E). In the same period the Indian Veterinary Research Institute, with the BNHS and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, tested meloxicam on vultures. The plan says it caused no deaths and was promoted as the alternative.

A loophole needed closing. Human diclofenac was sold in multi-dose vials of 30, 50 and 100 ml, and the plan says these were being used on cattle after the ban. In 2015 the government limited the vial size to 3 ml through a gazette notification.

The plan records how the drug showed up in cattle livers that vultures would eat. In 2005 and 2006, just before the ban, 10.1 per cent of sampled carcasses held diclofenac residues. By 2013 the figure was under 2 per cent, except in Rajasthan, where it was still above 5 per cent. The plan cites modelling that treats less than 1 per cent as safe for vulture populations. Pharmacy surveys in 2018 and 2019 within 100 km of Pinjore found that more than 60 per cent of chemists sold only meloxicam for cattle pain, and 3 per cent sold the 3 ml human ampoules.

The list of banned drugs grew in 2023. A notification of 31 July 2023 under Section 26A of the Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940, barred the manufacture, sale and distribution of ketoprofen and aceclofenac for animal use, Down To Earth reported. Vibhu Prakash told the magazine that aceclofenac converts to diclofenac once given to an animal. Prakash said nimesulide and other lethal drugs should also be banned, and Rinkita Gurav of WWF-India called nimesulide a major threat to vultures. The Down To Earth report does not list it among the banned drugs. The action plan cites a 2015 study of vultures found dead between 2000 and 2012, in which nimesulide at high tissue levels went with visceral gout in four of the five birds where it was found.

Eight breeding centres and the first captive hatchings

A conservation breeding programme for the three species was set up in 2004. The first centre opened that year at Pinjore in Haryana, run by the state forest department and the BNHS. Rajabhatkhawa in West Bengal followed in 2006 and Rani in Assam in 2008, and the Central Zoo Authority added five more with state zoos at Bhopal, Bhubaneswar, Hyderabad, Ranchi and Junagadh.

The action plan says all three critically endangered species were bred in captivity for the first time ever. By 2019 a total of 396 birds had hatched and fledged at the centres, 274 of them at Pinjore. The housed population stood at 731 in 2019 and 2020: 363 white-backed, 262 long-billed and 106 slender-billed, with 333 of them at Pinjore. Each centre was meant to house 25 pairs of each species found in its region, and the programme aimed to release 100 pairs of each housed species within ten years of releases starting.

A PTI report of 31 May 2026 says four centres, at Pinjore, Rajabhatkhawa, Rani and Bhopal, now house 740 vultures. The September statement adds that the breeding programme has completed 25 years and has bred more than 800 vultures of the three species.

Soft release in tiger reserves

Captive-bred birds are not simply let go. They spend time in pre-release aviaries built inside the release area, and BNHS has shifted its strategy toward tiger reserves, which the PTI report describes as largely free of harmful veterinary drugs and rich in wild carrion. The PTI report names Pench, Tadoba-Andhari and Melghat in Maharashtra, and says 20 birds were moved from Haryana to Maharashtra in 2024 and 34 in 2025. Our piece on how India counts its tigers covers the reserves themselves.

The BNHS statement of 5 September 2026 gives the latest results. In December 2025, 14 birds (nine white-backed and five long-billed) were soft-released at Pench, and in January 2026, 15 long-billed vultures were soft-released at Melghat. Of the Pench batch, 78 per cent were alive after nine months. At Melghat, 60 per cent were alive after eight months, with nine of the 15 established in the wild. Across two years, 13 of the 24 birds soft-released at Pench were still alive. Wild nesting success in East Pench rose from 89 per cent in 2024 to 100 per cent in 2025.

The earlier PTI report adds that white-backed vultures released in Haryana in 2020 have started breeding in the wild, and that a long-billed vulture released at Pench flew 750 km to Nashik in 17 days. It says 31 birds released from West Bengal have dispersed across India, Nepal and Bhutan with no reported deaths from veterinary drugs. BNHS Director Kishor Rithe is quoted as saying the programme “can succeed only when a safe environment is created for vultures beyond protected areas”.

What the counts show

The action plan says the decline was arrested by 2011. It reports that a survey by Prakash and colleagues put the white-backed vulture at a few thousand birds, possibly low tens of thousands, in 2015, and the long-billed at about 12,000, the most numerous of the three. The plan adds that the population is “still not safe” and that the shortest time a wild vulture population can double is about ten years.

The Wildlife Institute of India’s pan-India assessment of 2023 to 2025 is the first systematic nest count. It recorded 2,410 nests at 216 sites in 17 states. For the Indian (long-billed) vulture it found 1,379 nests, which translates to 2,058 to 2,758 breeding adults, with 715 of those nests in Madhya Pradesh. For the white-backed vulture it found 945 nests and 1,780 to 1,890 breeding adults, and 625 of those nests were in chir pine forest in Himachal Pradesh. For the slender-billed vulture it found 20 nests at 12 sites in Upper Assam, or about 40 breeding adults.

Madhya Pradesh runs its own synchronised counts. Deccan Chronicle listed 8,397 vultures in 2019, 9,446 in 2021 and 10,845 in 2024, and an unnamed senior forest officer gave it 12,981 for the count of February 2025. Outlook Traveller repeated the 2024 and 2025 totals in August 2026. The action plan reports 7,970 vultures of seven species sighted in the state in early 2019, so the baseline differs by source.

The WII report adds that the survey found no vulture nesting at nearly 70 per cent of the sites where it had once been recorded, and that 54 per cent of all nests were inside protected areas. It describes the numbers as a baseline for future counts, held in a new National Vulture Database. Our report on the great Indian bustard shows how another captive-breeding effort in India is being measured.