Critically evaluate India's progress towards FMD eradication and the institutional/administrative challenges in achieving 2030 targets.

Foot & Mouth Disease is the single largest drag on India's livestock economy, a sector contributing 31% of agricultural GVA and 5.5% of national GVA and supporting over 8 crore rural families [1]. India's mass-vaccination-led strategy under the National Animal Disease Control Programme (NADCP) [2] has delivered measurable gains, but the shift from control to certified eradication by 2030 remains institutionally demanding.

Progress achieved

• Falling disease burden: NSP seroprevalence positivity declined from 16.6% (2022) to 7.8% (2026) [1].
• Vaccination scale: about 1.4 billion FMD doses administered, with annual production capacity of 116 crore doses [1].
• Serotype gains: no Asia-1 serotype cases in the last three years [1].
• Traceability: ear-tagging and geo-tagged photographic verification now underpin vaccination tracking [1].
• Trade-oriented reform: adoption of WOAH-aligned zoning and compartmentalization, with nine priority States identified, to create internationally recognised disease-free zones [1].

Institutional and administrative challenges

• Federal coordination: animal husbandry is a State subject; uniform vaccination coverage and reporting quality vary, requiring sustained Centre–State convergence [1].
• Diagnostic capacity: laboratory quality remains uneven — hence the Rate My Laboratory App launched under the Pandemic Fund to benchmark labs [1].
• Technical gaps: control of SAT serotypes and rollout of negative marker vaccines (needed to distinguish infected from vaccinated animals for WOAH certification) are still under deliberation [1].
• Biosecurity burden: compartmentalization presumes enterprise-level biosecurity, hard to enforce across India's smallholder, mobile, mixed-herd systems.
• Capital and manpower: implementation depends on convergence with the SASCI scheme and on veterinary field staffing [1].

India has convincingly bent the FMD curve; the remaining task is administrative rather than scientific. A decentralised, WOAH-benchmarked zoning model — backed by strengthened diagnostics, marker-vaccine deployment and firm Centre–State accountability — can convert this epidemiological gain into certified disease-free status by 2030, advancing rural incomes, export competitiveness and the SDG-2 goal of resilient food systems.