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Poultry includes domestic fowls like chickens, ducks, geese, Japanese quil/emu, and turkey. These are kept to obtain meat, eggs, and feathers. Poultry farming requires small capital investment and provides good additional income and job opportunity to the rural population. There are over 300 million hens in the country which laid 54 billion eggs in 2009-10.
The poultry sector, with a total value of output exceeding Rs. 1.5,000 crore and providing direct and indirect employment to over three million people, produced around 1.9 million tonnes of chicken meat in 2005.
Andhra Pradesh has the largest number of poultry population followed by Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Assam, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Kerala, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, and Uttar Pradesh. Poultry farms have been developed around almost all the important urban centres like Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi.
Chandigarh. Chennai, Hyderabad, Pune, Bangalore, Nagpur, Bhubaneswar, Shimla, and Ajmer.
The Indian fowls belong to two categories: (i) Desi, and (ii) exotic or imported. The Desi breed include Chittagong, Punjabi, Brown, Chagas, Lolab, Naked- neck, Titre, Bursa, Tillicherry, etc. The imported breeds include White Leghorn, Rhode Island Red, Black Minorca, Plymouth Rock, New Hampshire, Light Sussex, Brown Leghorn and Australorp, etc.
The Central Poultry Farms are located at Mumbai, Hassarghatta (near Bangalore), Chandigarh and Bhubaneswar. These farms are established to improve poultry breed to produce more eggs.
Export of products such as live poultry, eggs, hatching eggs, frozen eggs, egg-powder, and poultry meat are made to Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, South West Asian countries, Japan, Denmark, Poland, U SA, and Angola.
The bird influenza has created numerous problems for poultry development in India. The first outbreak was in 2006 in a small area in Maharashtra. The second outbreak was also reported from Maharashtra a few months later. In order to overcome this problem, an active surveillance programme is being carried out all over the country focusing on an early detection of avian influenza. The Government of India maintains a strategic reserve of poultry vaccine. India has a fully equipped Bio-Security Level 3 laboratory at Bhopal.
ENERGY
Energy is an essential input for economic development and improving the quality of life. Energy may be classified into two categories, namely: (i) conventional (coal, petroleum, natural gas, and electricity), and (ii) non-conventional energy (solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, and biogas energy). Energy can also be classified into non-commercial (fuel-wood, charcoal, dried cow-dung, animal waste and animal power), and commercial energy (coal, mineral oil, natural gas, hydro- power, nuclear power wind energy, solar energy). It is the commercial energy which plays a vital role in the economic development of a country. A brief description of the sources of commercial energy, their distribution and production has been given in the following section.