It breathed its last on the morning of April 20. Its tiny legs collapsed as it inched close to a handpump near the village temple.

Villagers took the body away.

The calf lay on the dry bed of the village pond in Achchara in Madhya Pradesh's Tikamgarh district, one of the 13 districts of Bundelkhand, the arid region in the grip of one of its worst droughts.

“When drinking water is scarce for people,” said Munna Ahirwar, a resident of the village, “who has the capacity to fill water for the animals?”

The farmer said half a dozen cows in the village had died by falling into wells.

As drought intensifies in Bundelkhand, farmers in the region have been releasing their cattle in the wild. This is an old tradition called anna pratha.

Every year, said farmers, the cattle would come back. But this year, thirsty animals are dying, often just when their search for water ends.

While many ponds in the region have dried up, some have small patches of moist earth. For frail animals, the patches are quicksands, said Ravi Tomar, an activist with the non-profit Parmarth. Their legs get stuck. Unable to extricate themselves, they collapse and die.

Abhishek Mishra, an activist in Mahoba district in Uttar Pradesh told Mint that 3,000 animals had died in that district alone.

But the state governments are not keeping count of the dead.

An official in the Animal Husbandry Department in Tikamgarh, Bimal Kumar Trivedi, said it was not possible to track abandoned animals.

“We carry out post-mortems of dead animals only when the owner of the animal claims compensation money from the government,” he said. According to him, compensation was given for death due to natural calamities, praakritik aapada. “Rain, lightening, fire,” he said, listing them out.

Isn’t drought a natural calamity? I asked.

Changing tack, Trivedi said, “Compensation is given for accidental deaths, akasmat maut."

Livestock is a vital part of India's farm economy. Keeping the animals safe from hunger and thirst is a crucial component of the government's drought relief protocols.

Continuing an old tradition, Maharashtra has set up cattle camps in the drought-hit region of Marathwada this year.

Neither Uttar Pradesh nor Madhya Pradesh have done so.

Uttar Pradesh claims to have set up centres to distribute free fodder, but in Lalitpur district, neither farmers nor activists had heard of them. The village development officer of Talbehat block, Pankaj Soni, said the centres ran for two months, February and March, in the villages of Jamalpur and Nathikheda. “Fodder was purchased from outside the district and five kilos was given per animal to local farmers,” he said. The centres were no longer operational, he added, because “now there is enough fodder” in the district.

This is a misleading claim.

There is fodder in the district, after some farmers, particularly those with access to canal water or private borewells, harvested wheat in March. But the fodder is not enough.

In many places, the water ran out at the end of the season, and the crop withered, yielding a low yield of poor quality grain. Farmers spent time and money on harvesting it, solely to build stocks of fodder for their animals.

Only a few farmers have extra fodder to sell in the market. The prices have, naturally, skyrocketed.

“One trolley of fodder comes at Rs 10,000,” said Prem Das, a Dalit farmer with two bighas of land, or a little over one acre, which had gone fallow in the winter. A trolley-load of fodder can feed 10 animals for a month, he said.

Unable to afford the price, in the last week of April, he walked down from his village, Lidhoura in Tikamgarh, to the cattle fair at Anjani in Lalitpur, with his sole pair of bulls. The trek took a day and half.

Das expected to sell one bull for Rs 25,000. To his shock, he found the highest price being offered was just Rs 7,000.

Dejected, as he walked back home with the animals, he said, "I am a mazdoor aadmi, a manual worker. I can work hard. But how can I buy food for the animals, when I am struggling to feed my children?"