Meat-eaters causing disasters in Himachal: IIT-Mandi director stokes controversy

'It [Himachal Pradesh] is having landslides, cloudbursts and many other things again and again, these are all effects of cruelty on animals,' the IIT-Mandi director said.

An Indian Institute of Technology director on Thursday stoked a big controversy claiming that it was the practice of meat-eating that had led to “mass-scale landslides and cloudbursts” in Himachal Pradesh.

“Himachal Pradesh will have significant downfall if innocent animals are butchered. You are butchering animals there...the innocent animals. It has a symbiotic relationship with the degradation of the environment as well... which you cannot see right now but is there,” Laxmidhar Behera, director of IIT Mandi said while addressing a group of students, a video of which is doing the rounds on social media.

“Himachal Pradesh is having landslides, cloudbursts and many other things again and again, these are all effects of cruelty on animals...people eat meat," Behra said.

He offered a prescription on how to become good human beings. “To become a good human being, what will you have to do...Say no to meat eating,” the IIT director said from a stage compelling the students in the audience to repeat ‘no to meat eating’ multiple times after him.

While the video is undated, Behera and IIT Mandi haven’t responded to controversies that the comments generated till the time of filing this report.

“We are finished as we slip into the 5000 years old Rig Vedic age!,” said K Sujatha Rao, former Union Health Secretary in her post on X. "The collapse is complete. These superstitious fools will destroy whatever little was built in 70 years," said Sandeep Manudhane, an entrepreneur and IIT Delhi alumni on X.

Gautam Menon, a professor of physics and biology at Ashoka University said, "In the current dispensation, having views like those of the director of IIT Mandi is a feature, not a bug. It's simply sad."

Behera, who was a professor of electrical engineering at IIT Kanpur before joining IIT Mandi, however, was not new to such controversies. He had earlier claimed that he was involved in an act of exorcism to rid his friend's apartment and family of "evil spirits" by chanting "holy mantras".

During the Covid-19 period, he claimed to have run a community kitchen feeding 800 street children daily. This was recognised by Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan who had put out a twitter plug on the initiative.

As per the IIT Kanpur website, Behera's areas of expertise are robotics and artificial intelligence. He holds a PhD from IIT Delhi and a postdoctoral degree from German National Center for Information Technology.