A State Set the Price of Cow Urine at ₹10 a Litre. Someone Started Cutting It With Buffalo.

The scam, if it is a scam, works like this. Buy pure cow urine off a farmer. Top the barrel up with buffalo urine. Sell the whole thing as pure, and pocket the difference on the volume you did not have to buy.

It is worth doing for one reason: somebody has set a price. In India, ₹10 a litre is now the official rate for cow urine, and that is not a figure of speech. It is a rate, with collection points, a daily total, and a woman at the counter who keeps ₹2 of every litre she takes in.

The middlemen, being street smart, are said to have done the obvious thing with that. Buffalo urine costs nothing, looks identical, and arrives in the same steel cans. Nobody in the chain can tell by looking. The claim is circulating on social media rather than in any newspaper, nobody official has confirmed it, and no enforcement action has been reported, so treat it as a rumour. Just a rumour with an extremely plausible shape, because guaranteeing a price for a liquid nobody can identify by eye is the entire history of the honey trade, the olive oil trade, and every milk scandal of the last hundred years.

Why there is a price at all

The scheme behind it is a pilot in Narsena, in Bulandshahr's Syana tehsil, run by the Uttar Pradesh state government across 15 villages and currently taking in around 500 litres a day. Somebody, somewhere, is reconciling that in a spreadsheet.

And the reasoning is genuinely sensible, which is the part nobody shares. It is not for drinking. The urine goes into the herb preparations used as pesticide and growth promoter in natural farming, and the pilot sits inside the state's push to get chemicals off fields. It also solves a real problem: a cow that has stopped producing milk is expensive to feed and awkward to be rid of, so giving the animal a second revenue stream stops it being a liability. That is a coherent piece of agricultural policy, and it is how a government ends up publishing a price per litre of cow urine. The opposition Samajwadi Party has called the whole thing a scam, which at this point is the least surprising sentence in the story.

The part that undoes everything

All of this rests on cow urine being meaningfully different from other urine. That premise has been tested, by India's own people. In 2022 a team at the ICAR-Indian Veterinary Research Institute in Bareilly, a government body, analysed 73 samples from cows, buffaloes and humans. The cow samples carried at least 14 types of potentially harmful bacteria, E. coli the most common, and the lead author's conclusion was not hedged: in no case can urine be recommended for human consumption. The widely held belief that cow urine is antibacterial, the study found, cannot be generalised.

The same study turned up one detail that is very awkward for the men currently accused of fraud. Against certain bacteria, buffalo urine performed better than cow urine.

So if the middlemen really are topping up the barrels with buffalo, the accurate description of what they are selling is a marginally improved product. They are not diluting the good stuff. They are cutting it with the slightly better stuff, at a markup, to buyers who cannot tell and to a market whose central claim did not survive contact with a laboratory in Bareilly.

Our suggestion

There is exactly one thing a state does about an adulterated commodity, and it has never once been fewer officials. So Uttar Pradesh should stop pretending otherwise and license professional cow urine tasters now, ahead of demand.

Nobody is procuring a laboratory for 500 litres a day, so it will have to be a person: a graded palate, a minimum number of years on the job, and the authority to turn away a full tanker on the nose alone. Grade A, unmistakably cow. Grade B, notes of buffalo.

And when a supplier disputes a grade, because suppliers do, the file should go up the chain to a second taster. Senior. Better paid. Tasting it again.