Dr Natesan Punniamurthy
Padma Shri, 2026 — Veterinary Medicine (Ethno-Veterinary Science)
The farm boy from Vallam who taught a cow to heal with aloe, turmeric and lime — and taught a nation that clean milk begins in a clean udder, not a bottle of antibiotic.

6 March 1957, Vallam village, Thanjavur. Agrarian house. School in Thanjavur and Poondi. BVSc, MVSc, PhD in Veterinary Pharmacology and Toxicology from Madras Veterinary College — gold medal for the doctorate. Forty-five years of teaching and research: TNAU, TANUVAS (he headed the ethno-veterinary herbal centre at Thanjavur), TDU Bengaluru, NDDB. In 2001 he left the classroom. Pharmacology, he had decided, belonged in the field. Ten years to standardise the recipes. Siddha wisdom, livestock knowledge, modern trial. Stand-alone herbal protocols — no synthetic chemical riding along — for mastitis, foot-and-mouth, lumpy skin, parasites, rumen, fertility, wounds. Five simple remedies covering some thirty-four conditions. Mastitis: one piece of aloe vera, two handfuls of turmeric, a pinch of lime. NDDB carried the work to lakhs of farmers. Recovery rates above eighty per cent across more than a million recorded cases. Antibiotic residue in milk fell sharply. The purchase bill for drugs fell with it. Findings given away free.

His sentence is larger than the cow.

“My intervention is to see that we get clean milk and eggs from the livestock and clean dung and urine which is going to be the base for organic and natural farming.” The animal is not only food. It is the soil’s next meal. Conserve the antibiotic for a day when nothing else will do. Livestock-centric agriculture, food safety, a living soil. The Padma Shri, he said, is impetus for the next movement: prevention, not only cure. Tamil Nadu Scientist Award, 2013. Veterinary Council of India Lifetime Achievement, 2019. Emeritus Professor of ethno-veterinary science at TDU.

A farmer once asked him why a gold-medal pharmacologist was grinding turmeric in a village yard.

“Because I went to North America to see how they teach toxicology,” he is said to have answered, “and came home knowing they were not working on our problems. Aloe does not need a cold chain. The cow is already here.”