Bringing animal ethics into Indian universities: a fellowship at Delhi University

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 and seminars 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, acting as a starting point for new Animal Welfare Societies or clubs in Delhi’s colleges.

The call is open

Any student or college from Delhi University that wants to host a group is welcome to write to us at [email protected], whether or not it already has an animal welfare society.

Some colleges have already signed up for the fellowship: Hindu College, Kirori Mal College, Kamala Nehru College, Dayal Singh College, Miranda House College and Bharati College.

On average, thirty students have signed up at each of these colleges so far. There is no cap on places: any student at the University of Delhi can join.

We are also looking for collaborators: guest speakers, and especially anyone interested in running similar campus programmes elsewhere.

Why India and Delhi University

India has an enormous and rapidly intensifying animal agriculture sector, with fast-growing poultry, dairy, and aquaculture industries. It also has a large population of wild animals. 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 is a vital stage where a person is expected to re-examine their inherited beliefs, examine arguments, and defend reasoned positions.

Delhi University has around 70 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.

Structure of the fellowship

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 or a student lead from the host college.

·⠀Session 1: Foundations: moral status, sentience, speciesism, and the major ethical theories

·⠀Session 2: Animals kept as companions in India: street dogs, breeding, ABC rules, abandonment

·⠀Session 3: Farmed animals: dairy, poultry, aquaculture, invertebrates, and work that can be done to help them

·⠀Session 4: Wild animal welfare: harms animals face in the wild, differences with conservation and what can be done about it in India

·⠀Session 5: Indian animal law: the regulatory landscape and how it is actually enforced

·⠀Session 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.

Towards a credit-based course: In the medium term, we want this to encourage animal ethics to be added as a value-added course, and eventually for animal ethics to be included in the curricula of different subjects in the university.

What we are aiming for

·⠀Activating animal welfare societies: Our primary goal is to activate the animal protection societies that already exist in these colleges, and to help incubate them where they do not.

·⠀Keeping them running: A society that continues past this cohort will bring successive years of students into contact with these questions.

·⠀Building a talent pipeline: We want to connect promising fellows to organisations working on impactful areas of animal advocacy, or at minimum to leave them thinking about their careers in those terms.

How you can help

·⠀Student club organisers on campus: Anywhere in India or other countries, to discuss how we can collaborate.

·⠀Guest speakers: on animal ethics, wild animal suffering, sentience, animal law, or careers. Remote is fine.

·⠀Organisations: Open to hosting fellows for volunteering or project work.

Write to us at [email protected] to collaborate on any of the above.