Environmental law & policy in India : cases and materials / Shyam Divan, Armin Rosencranz.

"1 Introduction A. Environmental regulation since 2000: an overview I. The Plastic Cow. On a searing day at Karuna Society's animal hospital at Puttaparthi in Andhra Pradesh, Dr. Narendra Reddy Mittapalli used his practiced hands to conduct a rumenotomy. Slicing open the cow's stomach, his surgical team wielded scalpels to cut through a hard mass of foreign matter that sat in the cow's belly. The clumps were removed, the digestive juices that drained during the surgery were returned to the stomach and the vertical incision stitched before the animal was led away to rest. The rumenotomy yielded 61 kgs of plastic waste that had choked the digestive tract of the distressed animal. By October 2011, Karuna's animal hospital documented 53 rumenotomies and in each case the cow had ingested huge quantities of plastic. Across India, plastic trash bags are used for disposing kitchen waste in open garbage locations. To reach what is in the bags, cows and other animals chew and swallow the plastic. Cows that roam India are plastic cows. Karuna's local lobbying succeeded in persuading the Anantpur municipal corporation to ban plastic bags and remove open garbage bins that attracted stray cattle. Teaming up with other animal rights activists, Karuna opened its animal shelter to the press, helped prepare a documentary film and then petitioned the Supreme Court"--