From buffalo’s veins to the medicine chest

As the buffalo at the abattoir breathes its last, the boy replaces the full tray with an empty one and pours the blood into a bucket which is emptied into a rotatingsteel container a few metres away. The whirring blades prevent blood from clotting. In another rotating machine, a worker sticks his arm into the blood to look for stray body parts. The blood is poured into aluminum drums and taken to an adjoining room owned by the drug company, where a veterinary doctor and a supervisor oversee the operations.

The drums are emptied into a centrifugal machine which separates haemoglobin from the blood. They then conduct tests to check for purity and then leave for their factory with 12 drums (about 40 litres) of haemoglobin.

“While each buffalo yields eight kgs of blood, that makes for only four kgs of haemoglobin,” says Kureshi, a contract labourer who used to work the separating machines. “I quit that job as I do not want to make a living working with the blood of beasts,” he says.

He claims that around 1,200 buffalos are slaughtered daily till noon, starting at 5 am. However, MCD officials at the abattoir say that the numbers are restricted to 500 following aGovernment order.

The life of any drug company producing a iron tonic worth its name revolves around a slaughter house. As there are more slaughter houses in North India, companies concentrate their haemoglobin collection here to feed the factories down south. “We regularly supply haemoglobin to our Hyderabad factory,” says a Catchet worker.

The 20 centres of Wardex Pharmaceuticals Ltd, known for its iron tonic Dexorange, are each situated near a slaughter house. In Meerut, it is at the slaughter house on Hapur Road and in Saharanpur, it is near the abattoir in Kamela Colony. In Delhi, it used to be at the MCD abattoir in Sadar till the ban on blood collection in August, says a veterinary doctor with Wardex who is now expecting to lose his job. He said that he was once engaged in blood collection, but is now sitting idle as Wardex, which organises 50 per cent of the haemoglobin used in iron tonics, has stopped sending its doctors to the abattoirs and has relieved seven of them of their jobs after theorder.

Firms like Catchet have sought an extension of six months and doctors there say they were confident of being absorbed in other areas. But for now, the blood-letting continues.