The temporary setback to poultry due to bird flu aside, the consumption of poultry products is sure to continue to swell. But, unfortunately, this is true largely of urban areas. In the rural and tribal areas, where the bulk of the population resides, the consumption of these nutritious food products is constrained because of inadequate availability. These are actually the areas where better nutrition is needed if the overall per capita productivity of the nation has to go up. For this, backyard poultry farming needs to get a boost.

The organised sector poultry industry has been clocking a healthy annual growth of nearly 5.7 per cent in egg production and 12.5 per cent in broilers output. But the rural poultry sector has not displayed such dynamism. The latest available numbers reveal that chicken population in the rural areas has grown from 63 million to only 73 million in the past 35 years, resulting in static, if not lower, per capita consumption.

Indeed, there seems little reason why the backyard or household poultry farming cannot grow. Lack of demand is surely not holding it back. Otherwise, the poultry products would not be selling at about 25 per cent higher prices in the villages than in the close-by towns.

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The main constraint is the lack of suitable birds for rural poultry. Although the native chicken varieties are sturdy, well-adapted to harsh living conditions and relatively immune to many of the common diseases of commercial poultry birds, their productivity is low. The birds bred specifically for commercial poultry farming, on the other hand, are unsuitable for backyard poultry farming as they cannot survive under those conditions.

Nor is the technology for commercial poultry rearing suitable for rural areas. It will also not be economically viable to try out the modern poultry management in the backyard poultry due to high input costs.

What is needed, therefore, is a different kind of poultry management technology, besides suitable breeds of chicks, for the rural sector. This issue, fortunately, is now sought to be addressed by the Hyderabad-based Project Directorate on Poultry (PDP), a wing of the Indian Council Agricultural Research (ICAR). It has developed suitable packages for bird-rearing practices for completely free range poultry farming, semi-intensive farming and intensive poultry farming in rural areas.

This directorate, as well as some agricultural universities, have also evolved some poultry breeds that can thrive under rural conditions. This technology is capable of making household scale rural poultry an economically lucrative business to supplement income and nutrition.

In fact, the PDP is upbeat about the prospects of export of poultry products from the rural sector because of the rising global demand for such products. Health and taste conscious consumers in the developed countries are now willing to pay a premium price for eggs and meat produced from birds reared under free-range conditions -- a trend similar to that in organically produced foods.

The discriminating consumers in India, too, are eager to buy desi poultry products at relatively higher prices because of their better flavour, though nutritionally there is hardly any difference between desi and commercial poultry products. Poultry co-operatives can take up the marketing and export of these products.

The three types of birds developed by the PDP for rural poultry rearing include Vanaraja, Gramapriya and Krishi-bro. While Vanaraja is a dual-purpose breed for producing both eggs and meat, Krishi-bro is meant largely for broiler production. Gramapriya is a good egg-laying breed.

The other breeds suited for poultry farming include Giriraja and Girirani (developed by the Bangalore-based agriculture university), Krishna (evolved by the Jabalpur farm varsity), Nandanam-99 ( developed by Chennai-based Veterinary university), Grama Laxmi (developed by Kerala agricultural university) and Kalinga Brown (developed by the Bhuvaneshwar-based poultry organisation -- CPDO).

Barring Giriraja, which is a dual purpose bird, all others are good egg-layers. The fertile eggs or one-day chicks to multiply them in the rural areas are available at these organisations.

The economics of rural poultry worked out by the PDP indicates that rearing of Vanaraja birds can offer a profit of about Rs 10 to 25 per male bird sold at the age of 12 weeks and Rs 105 per female bird from the sale of eggs in a laying cycle of 72 weeks.

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