India, Nov. 21 -- In August this year, Simon Long, editor-at-large, The Economist magazine, visited a gaushala in Uttar Pradesh. It was to get a feel of the country's dairy sector at a time America alleged that milk and crude oil, or the restrictions on the imports of the former from the US, and higher imports of the latter from Russia, had escalated the US-India trade war. "The experience reinforced my appreciation of how special that relationship (dairy and people) is, corrected some misconceptions, and, perhaps oddly, illuminated why India finds it so hard to strike trade deals with other countries," he wrote.

One of the "misconceptions" that was "corrected" was that gaushalas, and similar shelters were only for the geriatric, lame, o...