Cloning technique reaches farmer’s doorstep

Parveen Arora

Tribune News Service

Karnal, January 14

After six years of producing cloned buffalo through its own advanced ‘hand-guided cloning technique’, National Dairy Research Institute (NDRI), Karnal, in collaboration with the Central Institute for Research on Buffalo (CIRB), Hisar, is going to produce a cloned calf, not in a laboratory, but at a dairy farm.

If all goes as per plan, it will be the first-of-its-kind achievement in the country.

Through the technique, two buffaloes at a dairy farm of Sirsa-based Dera Sacha Sauda are expected to deliver female cloned calves in eight months, said AK Srivastava, NDRI Director, and Inderjeet Singh, Director, CIRB, here today at the inaugural day of a three-day convention on “Nutritional pharmacology and toxicology beyond calories”. Srivastava said it would be a rarest of the rare moment for them as the clones were only produced at the NDRI’s farm, but it was the first time they were trying to produce it in a farm outside the institute.

“Our two students Naresh Salokhar and Dharmender Kumar had joined the CIRB recently. They are working with dedication and with the help of NDRI and PS Yadav, working at CIRB, took the cloning technique to the farm,” he said.

The funding has been given by the ICAR and the dera has been giving its infrastructural support to them, the director said.

Inderjeet Singh said they had taken the somatic cell from the ventral part of the tale of high-yielding buffalo of a farmer, Karambir, of Kurukshetra’s Sunaria village, which peak milk yield was 26.5 kg.

They had tried this technique on 11 buffaloes, but got success in two buffaloes, he said. “NDRI has produced 11 cloned calves and eight have survived. It has produced second generation of two cloned buffaloes,” the Director added.