 What comes to your mind when I say dead eaters? Vultures, right? See, they don't just eat the carcasses of the dead animals, they also eat human dead bodies. Getting interesting know? Here's everything you need to know about vultures. See vultures are scavenging birds. Know that they have been divided into new world vultures and old world vultures. See new world vultures include the Californian Condors and Andean Condors and the old world vultures include the white rum turned red-headed vultures. Now coming to its habitat, new world vultures are found in the Northern South America and old world vultures are found in Europe, Africa and Asia but according to government sources there are no vultures in Australia and Antarctica. See these are important facts. Take note of it. Now with respect to India, nine species of vultures exist in India. They include Oriental white-backed vulture, slender-billed vulture, long-billed vulture, Egyptian vulture, red-headed vulture, Indian griffon vulture, Himalayan griffon vulture, Cinerias vulture and bearded vulture. See among them five belong to the genus Gyps and in these five species, three of them namely the white-rombed vulture, long-billed vulture and the slender-billed vulture they are the residents of India and the remaining two that is the Eurasian griffon vulture and Himalayan griffon vulture they are largely wintering species. See so far we saw the basics about vulture, their characteristics and habitat. Now we are going to talk about the significance of it. See they play a vital role in the ecosystem by cleaning up the rotten carcasses left in the open environment. So how do they clean the carcasses? See this scavenge on carcasses of animals and thereby helping to keep the environment clean. See here carcasses means the dead flesh of the animals. Now apart from this they also scavenge on human carcasses. See here I'll tell you about the religious practice of the Pasi community regarding the disposal of dead bodies. See what they do is they follow the practice of sky burial where the corpse is exposed to the rays of the sun and the corpse or the dead body is consumed or devoured by birds of prey such as vultures and crows. See why do the Pasi community follow this kind of disposal of dead bodies? See they follow the sky burials in order to cleanly and efficiently dispose the human bodies. So these are all the significance of the vultures. Now we saw that the vulture population is declining. So what does this mean? This means that the removal of a major scavenger from the ecosystem will affect the equilibrium of the ecosystem. That is the removal of the vultures from the ecosystem will result in building up of decaying carcasses. Now having said that what causes the declining population of vultures or in other words what are the threats that are faced by the vultures? Firstly there is this poisoning from dichlofenac. See this dichlofenac is used as veterinary non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug. It is shortly referred as NSAID and it is used for livestock. See this drug treats the pain and the inflammatory diseases such as gout in the livestock and these livestock when they are dead they become the carcasses for vultures to feed on and the drug which is present in the dead carcasses of the animals affects the vulture and it leads to the death of vultures. See you won't believe this just 0.4 to 0.7% of animal carcasses contaminated with dichlofenac is sufficient to decimate 99% of the vulture populations. So because of this only the Ministry of Environment and Forest released the action plan for vulture conservation in the year 2006 and this included the ban of veterinary use of dichlofenac by the drugs controller general of India. Now this is one threat and secondly there is this loss of natural habitats and how is this happening? This is due to anthropogenic activities that includes the developmental process and the infrastructure establishments. Now this is one threat and the final one is the electrocution by power lines. See these are the main reasons why the vulture population is declining. Now having seen the threats now let us see the conservation efforts. See the action plan for vulture conservation 2020 to 2025 was launched by Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change and what are all the objectives of this action plan? The first objective is the drug control. Drug control in the sense it ensures the minimum use of dichlofenac and the second objective is to carry out safety testing of available NSAIDs on vultures and to develop new ones which do not affect the vultures and the third objective is to ensure that drug controller general of India must institute a system that automatically removes the drug from veterinary use if it is found to be toxic to vultures. See such a system would ensure that drugs other than dichlofenac that are toxic to vultures like achiclofenac and ketoprofen are banned for the veterinary use. And the next objective is to focus on upscaling the conservation. See this is done to establish additional conservation breeding centres along with the vulture conservation centres. And the next objective is to implement the vulture safe zone program at eight different places in the country where there are existing populations of vultures. And the next one is to launch conservation plans for the red headed and the Egyptian vultures with breeding programs for both. And then the last objective is to build four rescue centres for different geographical areas like Pinjore in the north, Bhopal in central India, Gowati in northeast and Hyderabad in south India. See this is regarding the action plan for vulture conservation 2020 to 2025. And then the next conservation effort is save program. See it is abbreviated as saving Asia's vulture from extension. See it is the consortium of like-minded regional and international organisations. It is created to oversee and coordinate conservation, campaigning and fundraising activities to help the plight of South Asia's vultures. Now coming to the objective of the program it is to save the three critically important species from extension through a single program. They are given in this image here. What are they? They are red headed vultures, slender build and white rumbed vulture. Know that the save partners are Bombay Natural History Society, Bird Conservation Nepal, RSPB UK, National Trust for Nature Conservation Nepal, International Centre for Birds of Prey, UK and Zoological Society of London. After seeing this video I hope you all understood the significance of vultures. See even though they just eat the carcasses of the dead animals they are still significant for ecological equilibrium. So I hope next time you see a vulture in your surroundings you will be able to spot which species of vulture it is. Now if you want to see more informative videos like this subscribe to Shankaray's Academy's YouTube channel and if you want to cope up with the current happenings around you watch Daily Hindu News Analysis of Shankaray's Academy. Thank you.