Career and Self Employment Opportunities in Poultry Science

Dr.A.K.Panda and Dr.B.C.Das

Poultry is one of the fastest growing segments of the agricultural sector in India with an average growth rate of 8 to 10 per cent per annum. As a result, India is now the world’s 3^rd largest egg producer (next to China and USA) and 5^th major producer of broiler chicken meat (after USA, China, Brazil and Mexico). The poultry sector contributes about Rs. 33,000 crore to national GNP and likely to reach to about Rs.60, 000 crore in the next five years. With a turnover of more than 352 billion rupees, this sector provides direct and indirect employment to over 3 million people in the country and has great potential to create employment opportunities with every increase of egg/meat consumption. In spite of spectacular growth in poultry sector in the last four decades, there exists huge gap between availability and requirement of poultry products. The present yearly per capita availability of egg is 46 against the requirement of 180 eggs. Similarly, against the yearly per capita requirement of 11 kg of meat, only about 1.8 kg poultry meat is available per head. Therefore, to meet the domestic requirement, there is a need for about 4 times increase in egg production and six times in meat production. If taken into account the domestic requirement as well as India’s share of export market, there is existence of huge production gap of poultry products in the country. Increase in population growth, changing life style, shifting of food habits, rapid urbanization, increased per capita income, increase awareness on health, increase in size of young population, etc., are contributing towards more demand on poultry products. In the current market scenario, the poultry products are cheapest source of animal protein of high biological value. This increased demand of poultry products is expected to create more than 10 million jobs of various categories in poultry industry.