The demand for food of animal origin is increasing in India due to economic growth, population growth and urbanisation, which in turn means greater use of cereals and oilseeds for animal feed. This is going to be the trend in most developing countries (Delgado et al., 1999). India would be going through a livestock revolution in the coming years. In the past two decades the increase in demand were coped mainly by expanding livestock population. However, declining land areas per agricultural population forces India to intensify livestock production. The emphasis so far has been on disease management, labor efficiency, management practices and increasing yields. Today, we are faced with an extraordinary set of challenges of increasing food production of animal origin with all the other limitations like land, water, weather etc and the question is how would we meet these demands. We also have another challenge that the food we produce has to be highly cost efficient to make it more sustainable. This means that the real prices of milk, eggs, meat and fish would be falling. In such a situation biotechnology would potentially play a very significant role in animal husbandry, covering the entire food production chain from strain development, diagnostics, preventive therapies, nutritive improvements to product processing. The biotech revolution has already reached India and various organizations are actively engaged in research and development activities to produce biotechnological products for the improvement of productivity and productive efficiency. Table 1 & Figure 1 shows the increasing demand for animal health in the coming years. Some of the National Institutes involved in Biotechnology R & D are Plant Genomics Centre, New Delhi, Institute for Microbial Technology (IMTECH), Chandigarh, Central Drug Research Institute (CDRI), Lucknow, National Institute of Immuology (NII), New Delhi and Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB), Hyderabad. Amongst the private organizations are Monsanto, Dr. Reddy’s lab, Shanta Biotech, Biocon, Wockhardt, Ranbaxy, The Thapar group and Nicholas Piramal.
