Mumbai’s towers of silence have fallen truly silent. For centuries, the Zoroastrian Parsis have laid their dead to rest atop these towers in South Mumbai. After paying their respects to their lost ones, the bodies are left for the vultures – which can clean a human corpse to the bone in hours.
It’s believed that being consumed by the vulture can liberate the soul. But today, there are barely any vultures remaining. And so, the Parsis have turned to the electric crematorium. In fact, since 2001, a solar reflector has been put to use to speed up the process of decomposition in the absence of vultures.
Man’s innovation aside, this bodes poorly for the ecology at large.
In the 1980s, there were about 40 million vultures in India and Nepal alone. By the mid-2000s, this had dropped to under 100,000. Of the nine species of vultures in India, three are Critically Endangered – a single step away from being extinct in the wild. Of these, the Oriental White-Rumped Vulture, ‘Gyps bengalensis’, has fewer than 15,000 remaining.
For years, the vulture’s 95 percent decline baffled scientists. India, a country where less than four percent of the 500 million cattle are consumed by humans, should have had an abundance of food for the winged scavenger. To complicate matters, the vulture’s decline occurred across South Asia and parts of South East Asia; in Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Southern Vietnam.
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