Pashujanya Yudh Abhyas: India's One Health Mock Drill Tests Zoonotic Outbreak Readiness

Political and Constitutional Dimensions The drill sits squarely on a division of powers that aspirants must state precisely. Under the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, 'Public health and sanitation; hospitals and dispensaries' is a State subject — List II (State List) Entry 6. Animal husbandry and the 'preservation, protection and improvement of stock and prevention of animal diseases' are likewise state-domain rural-economy subjects. This is why a national mission cannot simply command states; it must coordinate. Directive Principle Article 48 (Part IV) explicitly directs the State to organise agriculture and animal husbandry on modern, scientific lines, giving PYA a constitutional-policy anchor. It is important not to misdescribe this as a concurrent-list matter: public health and animal husbandry are principally State-List subjects, and any Union role rests on coordination, central schemes and the general executive power rather than on a claimed concurrent entry.

The political test PYA poses is therefore cooperative federalism in practice. The Union sets the framework and funds the mission; states own the veterinary infrastructure, the culling orders and the public-health machinery on the ground. A mock drill exposes whether that handshake works before a real outbreak forces it.

Economic and Financial Dimensions Livestock is not a marginal sector — it is a livelihood backbone for tens of millions of small and marginal farmers and a major contributor to agricultural gross value added, with dairying alone underpinning rural incomes across the Hindi belt and beyond. An uncontrolled zoonotic outbreak imposes cascading costs: mass culling destroys assets, movement bans freeze trade, export markets close on sanitary grounds, and human illness drains health budgets and labour productivity. Preventive drills are cheap insurance against these tail risks. The financial logic of One Health is that a rupee spent on early detection and rehearsed containment saves many multiples in outbreak-response, compensation and lost output later.

Social Dimensions Zoonotic outbreaks land hardest on the rural poor, who live in closest contact with animals and have the least buffer against income shocks. Culling, however necessary, can devastate a smallholder unless compensation is prompt and fair. PYA's inclusion of the district administration signals attention to the human dimension — communication with affected communities, rumour control, and the equitable delivery of compensation and vaccination. Public trust is itself an epidemiological variable: if farmers hide sick animals for fear of uncompensated culling, surveillance collapses. The social success of any real deployment will hinge on transparency and speed as much as on veterinary science.

Governance and Administrative Dimensions PYA is, at heart, an administrative-capacity test. Its core purpose is to evaluate inter-sectoral coordination — the seam between the veterinary department, the health department, wildlife authorities, laboratories and the collector's office — which is exactly where real responses tend to fail. The hub-and-spoke design of the National One Health Mission, to be anchored by the National Institute of One Health once operational, is meant to convert scattered data (from veterinary clinics, hospitals and environmental monitoring) into a single early-warning picture. A drill reveals gaps in the chain of command, reporting formats, and decision latency that no policy document can surface. For governance-focused GS answers, PYA is a clean example of shifting from reactive crisis management to institutionalised, rehearsed preparedness.

International Perspective One Health is a global governance movement, championed by the 'Quadripartite' of the WHO, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Organisation for Animal Health (WOAH) and the UN Environment Programme. India's obligations on disease notification and pandemic preparedness flow partly from international commitments such as the International Health Regulations. Under the Constitution, treaty-making and foreign affairs are Union-List subjects in the Seventh Schedule, and Article 253 empowers Parliament to legislate to implement international agreements — the constitutional bridge that lets the Union operationalise global health commitments even on subjects otherwise sitting with the states. By rehearsing zoonotic response, India also strengthens its credentials as a responsible actor in global health security and vaccine / diagnostic supply chains.