1. Pastoralists had to pay tax on every animal they grazed on the pastures. In most pastoral tracts of India, grazing tax was introduced in the mid-nineteenth century.
2. The tax per head of cattle went up rapidly and the system of the collection was made increasingly efficient.
3. During the 1850s to the 1880s, the right to collect the tax was auctioned out to contractors. There contractors tried to extract as high a tax as they could to recover the money they had paid to the state and earn as much profit as they could within the year.
4. By the 1880s the government began collecting taxes directly from the pastoralists. Each of them was given a pass. To enter a grazing tract, a cattle herder had to show the pass and pay the tax. The number of cattle heads he had and the amount of tax he paid was entered on the pass.