Coffee, tea or pee? How cow urine therapy is gaining popularity in India

Rukma Devi was 74 years old when she was diagnosed with advanced cancer of the lower digestive tract in 2008. Her son, BD Detha, a senior government official who is now posted as principal of the Jail Training Institute in Ajmer, took her to the Tata Memorial Centre in Mumbai where she was administered chemotherapy. Later, she had follow-up radiotherapy in Ahmedabad. The treatment took a toll on her general health. "She became weak and nervous, she couldn't eat anything," says Detha. The family then decided to try Ayurveda, given her advanced years. It worked. Her health improved. What's more, the cancer also seemed to disappear. "The allopathy medicines could have helped to contain the cancer, but I am convinced that the Ayurvedic medicines cured her completely," says Detha. Rukma Devi died of a heart attack earlier this year. One of the key ingredients of the medicine she was given was cow urine and dung.

Until 2006, Mohammad Ali wore eye-glasses that he says were so thick that children could use them to burn paper. "I also had different power in my two eyes. I could barely read the newspaper or see anything on the compute," he says. Then someone in his office, the excise collectorate in Nagore, Rajasthan, suggested he try an eye drop. There was no harm in trying, thought the 60-year-old, and began with two drops twice a day. The results were evident in 15-20 days. "I have not had to wear glasses in the past nine years," Ali says. The miracle medication, Netra Jyoti, contains cow urine, to which various herbs and berries have been added.
While we're not suggesting you try these remedies, there is an industry and fortune to be found in cow urine.

Cow urine 'refinery'
Each morning, half a dozen pick-up trucks drive out of the goshala (cow shelter) in Pathmeda village near Sanchore, a town in Rajasthan's Jalore district. The Pathmeda Godham, spread across 250 acres, is a large cow shelter housing around 45,000 cows. Each van is loaded with 40 large cans, each with a capacity of 48 litres. Travelling down NH15, they fan out along the village roads to villages across the district, the nearby districts of Barmer and Jaisalmer in Rajasthan and across the nearby Gujarat border into Banaskantha. Their objective? To collect gomutra, or the urine of cows, considered sacred in Hinduism.

In the villages, farmers/cow owners wait with large pails in which they have collected the urine. For most of them, it is a source of income over and above what they get from selling milk, as the goshala pays them Rs 5 per litre of urine. But there's a rider — the urine must be only from indigenous cow breeds; foreign breeds, such as the much-vaunted Jersey cows, will not do.

The urine is then brought to Pathmeda where it is fed into the cow urine "refinery" there. "Gomutra is boiled here and condensed to make 'ark' (extract). It is a completely mechanised process with no human intervention," says Shyam Sunder, managing director of the Shri Pathmeda Godham Mahatirth, the trust that oversees the functioning of the cow-shelter. The goshala was in the news early this month when a "refinery" — more of a distillery — with a capacity of 10,000 litres/day was inaugurated by the state health minister. "This is only phase one; in the next stage we hope to increase it to one lakh litres," says Sunder.

The Pathmeda Goshala is a unique combination of the spiritual and the entrepreneurial, of arcane 'knowledge' from our ancient texts such as Charaka Samhita, Atharva Veda, and Sushrut Samhita, and the advances of modern technology.

There are two companies at the Pathmeda Goshala to make and sell products made of this ark, and other cow products. The Goumutra 'ark' is marketed by the Prathvimeda Go Pharma Pvt Ltd as a "panacea" for all kinds of ills — a microbicidal wash for foodstuff, insulin substitute for diabetes, a mouthwash, a health tonic and so on. Some of the extract will also be used to make a floor disinfectant, under the brand name Gocleaner, which will be supplied to the SMS Hospital in Jaipur, and later, to other hospitals in the state, the minister said.

There's also another company, Parthvimeda Panchgavya Utpad Pvt Ltd, which manufactures and sells 67 other products made from panchagavya, a combination of five cow products — milk, curd, ghee, cow urine and dung, which is supposed to have mythic, medicinal properties. Among these are toothpaste, choorna (digestive), skin ointments, shampoo, and a range of organic foodgrains and pulses.

Shyam Singh Rajpurohit, an Ayurvedic who practices at the Goshala dispensary, elaborates on some of the recipes using gomutra and panchagavya as medicine: "Gomutra, boiled with laung (cloves), jaiphal (nutmeg) and javitri (mace), is very good for asthma, bronchitis and cough and cold. I prescribe gomutra of a three-year calf for cholesterol — two spoons in a glass of water, twice a day. Boil the urine of a calf in a copper vessel and mix it with rose water. Another one of its use is as an eye drop — it will bring the shine back to your eyes in no time."

The disinfectant properties of cow dung is well-accepted in rural India — kutchha houses are regularly layered with a mix of mud and cow dung to keep away insects. Cow dung cakes are invaluable as fuel in poor households and many Hindu ceremonies include the ritual imbibing of cow dung or panchagavya.

Even so, is there any scientific basis for the exalted claims that Rajpurohit and many others of the "gau" brigade make for cow urine, or other products? "I am witness to it, cow dung and urine are a 100 per cent cure for cancer," BJP MP Shankarbhai recently said in the Rajya Sabha.

Seeking evidence
In recent years, there has been a concerted effort to investigate — and, incredibly, acquire the support of the official science establishment to prove — the efficacy of cow urine and panchagavya as medicine. For instance, there was a two-day National Seminar on Panchagavya Chikitsa in August last year, organised by the central ministry of Ayush (an acronym for Aryurveda, Yoga, Naturopahty, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy), which brought together many of the researchers working in this field across India. Among the "scientific" papers presented at the seminar was a study on the Efficacy of cow urine therapy on various cancer patients in Mandsaur district, which claimed that of the 68 patients of throat, breast, cervix, uterine, lung and bone cancer and lymphoma, the use of cow urine therapy over two-three months alleviated pain, inflammation, burning sensation, difficulty in swallowing, irritation, etc.

Of course, none of these papers have been published in international scientific journals, so their claims haven't been tested by peer scrutiny. But that hasn't prevented some of our leading scientific institutions from conducting such investigations. "Many of these researches have been conducted in collaboration with the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, Indian Council for Agricultural Research and National Environmental Engineering Research Institute. Several Ayurveda universities and pharmacy colleges across the country are also engaged in research on the subject," says Sunil Mansinghka, coordinator of the Nagpur-based Go-Vigyan Anushandhan Kendra (GVAK), which helped organise the seminar.

"Every substance — be it cow urine or dung — can have medicinal properties. But it needs to be determined through standard scientific methods, such as a double blind study where the efficacy of the proposed medicine is decided by statistics. It has to be completely objective. But then why just cow urine — why not test the comparative efficacies of dog urine or human urine?" poses Soumitra Banerjee, professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research and general secretary of Breakthrough Science Society, a non-profit that aims to promote science and logical thinking.

Human urine
It isn't just cow urine that's gaining ground — human urine has its claimants to similar usefulness as well. Just last week, central minister and senior BJP leader Nitin Gadkari created a stir when he revealed that he "watered" the plants in his Delhi home with urine. Twitter broke out in titters: "When he gets pissed off, plants grow," posted one wag with the hashtag #Gadkarileaks!

But despite the witticisms and turned-up noses, science is on the side of Gadkari on this one. Human urine — or athropogenic liquid waste, as it is called in polite scientific jargon — makes for good fertiliser. As a recent study done by the University of Agriculture Sciences (UAS), Bangalore in collaboration with NGO Arghyam showed the use of human pee in farming resulted not just in a significant increase in crop output, but it also worked out cheaper for farmers. After all, chemical fertilisers such as urea are composed (mainly) of three elements — nitrogen, phosphate, potassium — which are also the main constituents of urine. Besides, according to Prof.

CA Srinivasamurthy, who helmed the study, there have been reports of human urine being used in farming from Switzerland, Finland and some parts of Africa. Go chew on that – or perhaps, don't!