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Bringing animal ethics into Indian universities: a fellowship at Delhi University
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Our team in India is running a pilot Animal Ethics India Fellowship, one of the first structured fellowships on Animal Ethics in India aimed at equipping students to defend all sentient beings through their careers. The pilot runs from September to December 2026 and is open to students of any field or semester across the colleges of the University of Delhi.
Animal Ethics has been running educational programmes with universities and educators in Latin America, Spain, and many other parts of the world for over a decade. This pilot is part of our wider effort to bring academics and young audiences into serious engagement with animal ethics.
Our main point of leverage is the AICTE/UGC advisory of June 2025, aligned with the National Education Policy 2020, which asks higher education institutions across India to establish Animal Welfare Societies. A parallel advisory from AICTE covers technical institutions. Between them, these reach a system of 64,756 higher education institutions and around 45 million students. Very few institutions have worked out how to operationalise these societies. Our fellowship offers a pathway for them to engage with animal advocacy in a more focused and effective way.
We are looking for collaborators: guest speakers and especially anyone running similar campus programmes elsewhere. Please write to us at [email protected].
India has an enormous and rapidly intensifying animal agriculture sector, with fast-growing poultry, dairy, and aquaculture industries. Public conversation about animals is lively, but it centres on dogs, cows, and the conservation of certain keystone species. It is rarely connected to the frameworks that allow people to reason clearly about large-scale harms to animals, sentience, or which problems deserve priority. India also has one of the largest young populations in the world. It is among the most consequential countries for animals, and a great deal of work remains to be done to draw on the talent it offers. University provides a good platform where a person can re-examine their inherited beliefs, examine arguments, and defend reasoned positions.
Delhi University has around 90 colleges and over half a million students, a high proportion of whom come from outside Delhi and return to states across the country. As a point of leverage over who ends up doing India's advocacy, research, and policy work a decade from now, it is well placed. We have already given a series of talks on wild animal suffering across Delhi University colleges, which is where much of this work began.
The UGC advisory is what makes the present moment different, because it gives us credibility when approaching these institutions. In practice, colleges have been handed an obligation without curriculum or facilitation, and most of the societies that do exist focus primarily on campus dogs. Since almost none of these colleges have a dedicated programme or subject on animal ethics, we hypothesize that an academic project of this kind is likely to be welcomed.
We have signed memoranda of understanding with six colleges so far, and we are still signing more:
The call is still open. Any college that wants to host a group is welcome to write to us, whether or not it already has an animal welfare society. Around 300 students have signed up at all of these colleges altogether so far. Promotion is still underway, so we will see how the numbers settle.
Phase 1: Learning (6/12 weeks): six weekly or bi-weekly sessions. Fellows do roughly two hours of readings and write a short reflection per fortnight, followed by a 90-minute live discussion co-facilitated by an Animal Ethics staff member and a faculty or student lead from the host college.
| Session | Topic |
|---|---|
| 1 | Foundations: moral status, sentience, speciesism, and the major ethical theories |
| 2 | Animals kept as companions in India: street dogs, breeding, Animal birth control rules, abandonment of animals kept as companions. |
| 3 | Animals used as food: dairy, poultry, aquaculture and harms to invertebrates |
| 4 | Wild animal suffering: harms from natural causes, and what separates advocacy from conservation, introduction to wild animal welfare science |
| 5 | Indian animal law: the regulatory landscape and how it is actually enforced |
| 6 | Careers and pathways into the movement |
Phase 2: Project (4 weeks): a small mentored project, such as a research brief or an operational plan for a campus Animal Welfare Society.
Phase 3: Connections and alumni (ongoing): we do not place fellows or guarantee positions. We offer introductions to organisations in our network, advisory support on next steps, and an alumni community. Fellows who complete at least the first two phases receive a certificate from Animal Ethics.
The fellowship is held online, with occasional in-person meetups to support engagement between fellows.
Cost: we charge nothing to run the fellowship. Animal welfare societies are free to charge a nominal fee to ensure student commitment to the program.
Write to us at [email protected] to collaborate on any of the above.
