India has the world's largest bovine population and dairying is the country's single largest agricultural commodity by value, so livestock disease is a rural income problem before it is a veterinary one. Foot and Mouth Disease rarely kills adult cattle, which is precisely what makes it insidious: it cuts milk yield, slows growth, causes infertility and takes working capacity out of bullocks, so the loss is spread thin across millions of small holdings and never registers as a visible catastrophe. Brucellosis works on the reproductive cycle, destroying calves through late-term abortion and interrupting lactation, and it is also a zoonosis that can infect the people who handle infected animals and their products. Endemic FMD is a trade barrier as well - countries free of the disease restrict imports of livestock products from those that are not, which caps India's access to global meat and dairy markets. That is why the surveillance figure matters more than the dose count. The fall in non-structural protein antibody prevalence from 20.8 per cent to 8.1 per cent measures how much virus is actually circulating in the population, not how many injections were given, and it is the evidence that would eventually support a claim of freedom from the disease.