While reviewing present status of mastitis in India, results of investigations from periurban dairy farms on epidemiological, clinical manifestations, diagnosis, bacterial isolation, in vitro drug sensitivity, and treatment of subclinical mastitis have been presented. Mastitis, on account of its causing serious wastage and undesirable milk quality, is emerging as a major challenge among the others (like breeding improvement, nutrition management, control of infectious, tick-borne, blood, and internal parasitic diseases) in dairy development of tropics. Subclinical mastitis was found more important in India (varying from 10-50% in cows and 5-20% in buffaloes) than clinical mastitis (1-10%). The incidence was highest in Purebred Holsteins and Jerseys and lowest in local cattle and buffaloes. An investigation on 250 animals from periurban farms indicated that the monsoon season was more prone to subclinical mastitis than summer or winter, prevalence increased with higher lactation number and animals in 4th-5th month of lactation were found more susceptible (59.49%), hind quarters were found more affected (56.52%) than fore quarters (43.47%). The factors like herd size, agro climatic conditions of the region, variations in sociocultural practices, milk marketing, literacy level of the animal owner, system of feeding, and management were found important affecting the incidence of subclinical mastitis. Comparison of efficacy of different diagnostic techniques for subclinical mastitis, such as modified California mastitis test (MCMT), bromo thymol blue (BTB), modified whiteside test, trypsin inhibition test, milk pH, and electric conductivity indicated MCMT to be most sensitive (95.16%) and specific (98.02%) test. The antimicrobial susceptibility test revealed that most of the bacterial strains (gram positive, gram negative, and mixed) isolated from subclinical mastitis milk samples, were highly sensitive to enrofloxacin 53.91%, least sensitive to oxytetracycline 17.39% and ampicillin 7.83%, and resistant to streptomycin. The therapy with enrofloxacin and nimesulide was found more efficacious (92.30%) in treating subclinical mastitis cows. It was concluded that consideration of socioecological factors for mastitis control in periurban area would help to reduce the cost of mastitis control in clean milk production.

Background The genetic structure of a diverse set of 15 Indian indigenous breeds and non-descript indigenous cattle sampled from eight states was examined, based on 777 k single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotypes obtained on 699 animals, with sample sizes ranging from 17 to 140 animals per breed. To date, this is the largest and most detailed assessment of the genetic diversity of Indian cattle breeds. Results Admixture analyses revealed that 109 of the indigenous animals analyzed had more than 1% Bos taurus admixture of relatively recent origin. Pure indigenous animals were defined as having more than 99% Bos indicus ancestry. Assessment of the genetic diversity within and between breeds using principal component analyses, F statistics, runs of homozygosity, the genomic relationship matrix, and maximum likelihood clustering based on allele frequencies revealed a low level of genetic diversity among the indigenous breeds compared to that of Bos taurus breeds. Correlations of SNP allele frequencies between breeds indicated that the genetic variation among the Bos indicus breeds was remarkably low. In addition, the variance in allele frequencies represented less than 1.5% between the Indian indigenous breeds compared to about 40% between Bos taurus dairy breeds. Effective population sizes (Ne) increased during a period post-domestication, notably for Ongole cattle, and then declined during the last 100 generations. Although we found that most of the identified runs of homozygosity are short in the Indian indigenous breeds, indicating no recent inbreeding, the high FROH coefficients and low FIS values point towards small population sizes. Nonetheless, the Ne of the Indian indigenous breeds is currently still larger than that of Bos taurus dairy breeds. Conclusions The changes in the estimates of effective population size are consistent with domestication from a large native population followed by consolidation into breeds with a more limited population size. The surprisingly low genetic diversity among Indian indigenous cattle breeds might be due to their large Ne since their domestication, which started to decline only 100 generations ago, compared to approximately 250 to 500 generations for Bos taurus dairy cattle.

Background India is the largest milk producer globally, with the largest proportion of cattle milk production coming from smallholder farms with an average herd size of less than two milking cows. These cows are mainly undefined multi-generation crosses between exotic dairy breeds and indigenous Indian cattle, with no performance or pedigree recording. Therefore, implementing genetic improvement based on genetic evaluation has not yet been possible. We present the first results from a large smallholder performance recording program in India, using single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotypes to estimate genetic parameters for monthly test-day (TD) milk records and to obtain and validate genomic estimated breeding values (GEBV). Results The average TD milk yield under the high, medium, and low production environments were 9.64, 6.88, and 4.61 kg, respectively. In the high production environment, the usual profile of a lactation curve was evident, whereas it was less evident in low and medium production environments. There was a clear trend of an increasing milk yield with an increasing Holstein Friesian (HF) proportion in the high production environment, but no increase above intermediate grades in the medium and low production environments. Trends for Jersey were small but yield estimates had a higher standard error than HF. Heritability estimates for TD yield across the lactation ranged from 0.193 to 0.250, with an average of 0.230. The additive genetic correlations between TD yield at different times in lactation were high, ranging from 0.846 to 0.998. The accuracy of phenotypic validation of GEBV from the method that is believed to be the least biased was 0.420, which was very similar to the accuracy obtained from the average prediction error variance of the GEBV. Conclusions The results indicate strong potential for genomic selection to improve milk production of smallholder crossbred cows in India. The performance of cows with different breed compositions can be determined in different Indian environments, which makes it possible to provide better advice to smallholder farmers on optimum breed composition for their environment.

Dairy farming plays a very important role in improving the economy of rural India. The study was conducted to explore the socio-economic profile of dairy farmers and farmers feedback about dairy development project. The survey was conducted to study the education status, family structure, education status and management of animals, different patterns of rearing of dairy animals and status of milk production. Data was collected from the 3000 dairy farmers of three states namely Maharashtra, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh during year  2016 .Concentration of poor farmers was relatively high in Bihar (35.5%), followed by Uttar Pradesh (30.9%) and 16.3% in case of Maharashtra. Average family size show 8.74 members per household in Bihar, 6.76 members in  Uttar Pradesh  and 6.17 members in Maharashtra. Results revealed that majority of the families were nuclear families. Main source of income was agriculture which includes livestock farming. As regards to the size of land owned, nearly 56% of the landowners were Marginal farmers (owning 0.1 -1 ha of land), 23% were small (1.1-2 ha) landowners while about 12% farmers owned above 2 ha of land. Literacy level was higher among farmers of Maharashtra (71.6%) as compared to Uttar Pradesh (65.8%) and Bihar (65.4%). Majority of the farmers followed mixed cropping system, Maximum number of cows and buffaloes were owned by the farmers of Maharashtra i.e. 3.37 cows and 1.42 buffaloes, followed by Uttar Pradesh (1.60 cows & 1.42 buffaloes) and Bihar (1.75 cows & 0.24 buffaloes).Farmers of Maharashtra owned maximum percentage of crossbred cows (90.97%), followed by Uttar Pradesh (83.4%) and Bihar (75.9%).Maharashtra farmers  possessed maximum number of upgraded buffaloes (79.4%), followed by Bihar (55.7%) and Uttar Pradesh (51.5%). In study of average quantity of milk produced by cows was higher among the crossbred cows (10.18 litres), in indigenous cows it was (4.47 litres) and 4.23 liters in Non-Descript cows. The data shows the same pattern of milk produced across the three states with slight variation. In buffaloes, the average quantity of milk produced was observed to be higher among the upgraded buffaloes (8.42 litres) as compared to Non-Descript buffaloes (5.17 litres). Respondents appreciated the fact that due to dairy development project by BAIF their family and social status have increased.

Data on 98336 artificial inseminations (AI) performed during 6 years (January 2010 to November 2015) on 56037 field animals owned by 29097 farmers’ from 44 cattle development centres spread across two districts of Maharashtra state were collected and analyzed. Whole data set was classified according to districts (Beed, Jalgaon), economic status of farmers (APL, BPL), animal breed (HF cross, Indigenous, Jersey cross, Non-descript), parity of animal (heifer, first, second, third, fourth, fifth calvers), animal body condition score (no rib exposed, one rib exposed, two ribs exposed, three ribs exposed), heat stage (early, mid, late), season of AI (rainy-June to September, winter-October to January, summer-February to May), bull breed used for AI ( HF, HF crossbreed, Jersey, Jersey crossbreed, Indigenous), AI sequence number (1,2,3) and AI Year (2010 to 2015). Least square analysis was used to compute conception rate. The results revealed overall mean conception rate as 46.2 ± 0.51% and it was significantly (p les than 0.01) higher in Beed district, Jersey crossbreed animals, animals having fourth parity, animals exhibiting one rib exposed, early heat and animals inseminated with Indigenous breed bulls semen, first AI sequence number and during the year 2015 compared with respective groups of parameters under study. However, effect of season of AI and economic condition of farmers did not affect conception rate in animals under field conditions of Maharashtra.