For over a century, India’s livestock economy has been measured, recorded, and planned around animals that stay put. Since the first Livestock Census was conducted in 1920 under the British administration, the exercise has taken place every five years, visiting villages and households to count cattle, buffaloes, goats, and sheep. But for 105 years, an entire class of livestock and their keepers, India’s nomadic pastoralists, remained invisible to this process. Their herds, constantly on the move across states and landscapes in search of grazing and water, fell outside the reach of enumerators who were instructed to record only settled households.The 21st Livestock Census was formally notified in 2024, with counting beginning in December 2024 and going on till mid-2025. This exercise, now completed and for the first time in its history, counted the animals of India’s pastoral communities, marking a quiet but historic shift in how the country sees its livestock systems. For the pastoralists of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and several other states, known variously as maldhari, ghumantu pashupalak, gadariya and so on, and belonging to communities such as Raika, Dhangar, or Kuruba, this recognition is not merely bureaucratic. It represents the possibility of being seen by a system that has long excluded them, and of gaining access to the same benefits and services that sedentary livestock owners receive as a matter of course.Why pastoralists were never countedThe exclusion of pastoralists from the census was not an accident of oversight but a reflection of how modern India came to view its rural economy. Through the Green and White Revolutions, development policy emphasised controlled, stationary, and “scientific” systems of production – high-yield crops, stall-fed dairy, commercial poultry. Nomadic and semi-nomadic systems that relied on movement, local ecology, and collective management of common grazing lands were dismissed as backward or inefficient. The census process has so far mirrored this prejudice. Enumerators, following standardised procedures, visited village after village, counting animals attached to permanent house numbers. Those who lived on the move – pitching deras in the forest or grazing their animals across state lines – simply did not exist on the government’s record.This invisibility had serious consequences. Government schemes for livestock insurance, vaccination, breed improvement, and veterinary care are designed and budgeted on the basis of census data. What was not counted was not eligible.Pastoralists moving between states also faced the additional burden of being treated as outsiders by local officials – often denied veterinary support or accused of trespassing, even as their herds contributed significantly to local economies. For decades, these patterns reinforced a systemic neglect of India’s mobile livestock keepers, despite their role in maintaining hardy indigenous breeds and in using fragile arid landscapes in sustainable, time-tested ways.While historically pastoralism has never been enumerated at the level of the country, the government of Jammu and Kashmir did undertake an effort to document its nomadic communities by conducting the first-ever comprehensive survey of the transhumant tribal populations in 2021. This extensive exercise included a complete demographic profile of the families, their migration routes, and a full profiling of their livestock, including specific counts of buffalo, sheep, goats, and horses. The survey counted a total population of close to 85,000 families, keeping close to 2.5 million livestock, across buffaloes, cattle, sheep and goats. A nomad moves towards warmer areas of Jammu along with his livestock after spending the summer in the higher reaches of Kashmir Valley, in Budgam district, Sunday, Oct. 12, 2025. Photo: PTI.A historic shiftThe decision to count pastoralists separately in the 21st Livestock Census emerged from years of dialogue between civil society organisations and the Department of Animal Husbandry. Civil society organisations and groups worked closely with government officials to develop an official definition of “pastoralist” and design methods suitable for counting mobile herds. The process involved something unprecedented: adapting the census procedure itself to accommodate mobility. For the first time, enumerators were authorised to record livestock outside formal village boundaries – in forests, grazing tracts, or roadside encampments – without requiring a fixed address or house number.This change also established a new administrative principle: that the responsibility for providing government services to migrating pastoralists would rest with the state where they were currently located. This meant that states such as Punjab, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, and Chhattisgarh, which host pastoralists from other regions during the dry season, were required to count and acknowledge these herds. It was a small but significant step toward institutionalising the idea that pastoralists and their animals are part of a shared national economy, not transient outsiders.Civil society organisations led by the Revitalising Rainfed Agriculture Network (RRAN) and Centre for Pastoralism, in partnership with the Department of Animal Husbandry formalised a Pastoral Census Support Cell. The cell provided field guidance, trained enumerators in recognising pastoral households, and developed procedures for identifying deras and mobile camps. These innovations marked a watershed moment: for the first time, the Indian state had a process, however imperfect, for counting animals that exist outside settled agrarian systems.Where the process fell shortYet the exercise also revealed how deeply entrenched biases and logistical challenges continue to distort pastoral visibility. Across many states, the new category of “pastoral livestock” was implemented encouragingly, still requiring many more counts to be fully representative. Much of this stemmed from confusion about what the term “pastoralist” actually meant. In several districts, enumerators assumed that only herders migrating across state borders qualified, excluding the far larger population that moves seasonally within a single district or region. Others believed that only families who migrate year-round were pastoralists, not those who undertake shorter migrations or move with part of their herds. Even households that temporarily return to their village homes during monsoon or festival periods were sometimes counted as “general households” simply because enumerators found them at home.These definitional ambiguities led to distorted figures. In Rajasthan, for instance, inter-district migrating Raikas and Rabaris were often not recorded under the pastoral category. In Gujarat, enumerators excluded herders who owned a permanent house in their village, assuming that anyone with a pucca structure could not be truly nomadic. As a result, many large herding families were listed under the general category, erasing the very distinction the census sought to introduce. In Punjab, pastoralists from Rajasthan who move with their herds across the state during the dry months were often missed altogether because they shift their temporary camps every few days, making them difficult to locate during the enumeration window.What the next census must learnThese discrepancies underline that while the 21st Livestock Census marks a turning point, the challenge of representing pastoral India accurately has only begun. Recognition in principle must now translate into methodological rigour on the ground. Civil society groups and the Pastoral Census Support Cell have already begun outlining reforms for the next round of counting. Among the most important is a revision of the pastoralist definition to include not only interstate migrants but also herders who move within districts or depend seasonally on common grazing lands. Equally critical is the need for early and detailed training of field enumerators, ideally six months before the enumeration begins, with clear guidelines and visual aids on identifying mobile herds.A related suggestion is to create real-time monitoring tools within the census app that would allow officials and support organisations to track the number of pastoral households recorded at the village and district level, flagging gaps or inconsistencies as the enumeration proceeds. And because counting mobile herds takes more time, there is a growing consensus that enumerators should receive higher remuneration for pastoral enumeration to ensure both motivation and accuracy.Beyond the mechanics of counting lies a larger question: what will India do with this data?For the first time, the government will have official numbers that reflect the scale and contribution of the pastoral system. These can guide policies on animal health, fodder security, and breed conservation that are better attuned to mobility and local ecology. They can also help design welfare schemes such as mobile veterinary services or cross-state grazing permits, that recognise movement as a legitimate livelihood strategy, not a sign of marginality.Counting as recognitionThe 21st Livestock Census thus represents a historic beginning, not an end. For more than a century, India’s development apparatus has treated pastoralism as an anomaly, something that could be modernised away. Yet pastoralists continue to supply milk, meat, wool, and manure to rural economies that depend on their mobility. They sustain some of India’s most resilient animal genetic resources and adapt to climatic variability with knowledge systems honed over generations. Counting them is not just about inclusion in statistics; it is about recognising a different logic of survival, one that remains crucial to the ecological and economic future of large parts of the country.For the first time, India has officially acknowledged that pastoralism exists and counts. Whether that acknowledgment leads to genuine support will depend on whether the next census, and the policies that follow, can see not just the numbers, but the lives and landscapes that move with them.Ramesh Bhatti is the programme director at the Centre for Pastoralism, leading work on pastoral institutions and policy advocacy.Aniruddh Sheth is the research coordinator at the Centre for Pastoralism, leading research on the political ecology of pastoralism.This is the third article in a series exploring the challenges faced by Indian pastoralism. Read the first and the second.