Year: 2026 | Month: June | Volume 71 | Issue 2
Break-Even Analysis, Milk-Feed Cost Squeeze, and Earned Income Vulnerability in North Indian Gaushalas
Pritam Roy1
Anil Kumar Dixit2*
Subhasis Mandal1
Ajmer Singh1
Sanjit Maiti3
Hardev Ram4 and A.K. Mishra5
DOI:10.46852/0424-2513.2.2026.16
Abstract:
How many productive animals would have to be on a Gaushala to be independent of donations and why is it that milk revenue never really fills the gap? These questions are at the heart of Gaushala financial policy, but neither has been addressed by previous multi-state work with audited data. This paper does that with the help of primary information obtained from the 32 Gaushalas surveyed in Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh in 2024–25. The results are presented in the context of three interrelated analyses. First, a break-even productive animal share analysis reveals that, for earned income self-sufficiency, a sector mean of nearly 37.5% (SD: 16.1 pp; range: 10.4–81.6%) would be required, whereas the break-even threshold for the sector under simulation is around 30%. Second, a milk-feed cost squeeze analysis reveals that the average institution is spending ` 150.8 per litre of milk for feed, resulting in a negative margin, which highlights why a sector that relies on milk revenue to achieve self-sufficiency is a challenge. Third, sensitivity scenarios to earned income show that the highest single intervention to income in the sector is 0.445, and the highest combined intervention is 0.422, both well below the BCR of 1.0 required for self-sufficiency. These are findings that challenge the policy debate; dependency on transfer income isn’t a stage that can more effectively be managed, it is the financial imprint of a welfare mandate. The policy issue is what to do to make that dependency more stable, closer to the true cost, and conditional on institutional performance.
Highlights
- First multi-state, audited break-even productive-share estimate for Indian gaushalas: sector mean 37.5% vs observed 11.8% - a 25.7 pp gap that prices the welfare mandate.
- Milk-feed cost squeeze quantified for the first time: feed costs ` 150.8/litre against a ` 42.6 milk price, a − ` 108.2/litre margin at each of the 32 institutions.
- No revenue intervention, individually or combined, achieves self-sufficiency; even increasing by-product revenue by three times raises the sector earned BCR to only 0.445 (threshold = 1.0).
- Dung revenue (BCR + 0.071) beats a 5/litre milk price hike (+0.017) because it comes from the total herd, not the productive minority.
- The negative correlation between EPA and productive share (ρ = −0.670) indicates that the 30% break-even target needs to be met by real productivity gains and not by animal reclassification.
- mDependence on transfer income is structural, not transitional - support should be cost-anchored, tiered, and durable, not framed as a “bridge to self-sufficiency.”
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