Most legal slaughter units are in TN

With 266 licensed slaughterhouses, Tamil Nadu tops the list of the states with the maximum number of legal cattle killing units, which goes contradictory to the southern state's popular image of a place where vegetarianism rules over the diet.

Besides Tamil Nadu, the other two states with more than 100 slaughterhouses are Jharkhand (140) and Maharashtra (104).

But in Jharkhand, each of the 140 units has obtained licenses from the state government whereas in Maharashtra 71 were having state licenses and the rest were given permissions by the central government.

In south India, Tamil Nadu is followed by Karnataka with 73 slaughterhouses— 67 state license and 6 central— while in the north, Uttar Pradesh has 65 slaughterhouses, out of which only 15 states licensees. In Tamil Nadu, as many as 259 of them have state licenses.

In 2017-18, more than 34 lakh cattle were slaughtered in 874 Indian slaughterhouses, out of which only 155 have licenses from the central government, Sanjeev Kumar Balyan, the minister of state for fisheries, animal husbandry and dairying, informed the Rajya Sabha in a written response.

“The rest (719) have state licenses as the preservation of cattle is a matter on which the legislature of the states have exclusive powers to legislate,” he said.

The figures exclude the animals smuggled across the India-Bangladesh border.

According to the Indian laws, slaughterhouses require permissions either from the central or state governments.

With cow vigilantism dominating the first innings of the Narendra Modi government and already raising its ugly head in the government's second innings, there's a lot of focus on the functioning of licensed slaughterhouses in the country and how they source their feedstock.

The maximum number of central government licensed slaughtering units is in Uttar Pradesh (50), which has a thriving beef export business. However, supplying cattle to such units has become a problematic issue for many Uttar Pradesh farmers in the BJP regime.

The entire Northeast has six units, out of which four have state licenses. The only two central government permitted slaughterhouses are in Assam. In contrast, Kerala has 21 (state: central—16:5), Jammu and Kashmir (27, all state) and Chhatishgarh (44, all state).

The disclosure on slaughterhouses coincides with the filing of a controversial charge sheet by the Rajasthan Police in which the two sons of Pehlu Khan— the first victim of the cow vigilantism, who was killed in April 2017— have been charge-sheeted for cattle smuggling.