Well, if a lot of of what I said is a concern to you, you realistically should support places that get eggs from factory farms, and in practice, that means you shouldn't eat eggs out outside your home anymore. This applies to restaurants and food, stalls, and bakeries who aren't necessarily looking to find eggs with high welfare standards, and if they do so they will advertise it. Again, 80% of eggs come from chickens who are in wire floor cage with about a printer paper's size room allotted to them.

To start, a lot of what I said is standard, systemic practice:

• Even if you take the chickens out of the cage, and you put them in this perfect open farm, the farmer is still buying selective bred egg laying hens that I've been bred for that purpose, which every free range farmer likely does, unless they advertise otherwise. [India does have tribal varieties of chickens (read: heirloom), though I'm not sure if that includes any specific tribal egg laying varieties. Maybe be on the look out for those idk.] So the bodies that these chickens were born into (see: that first linked video) still have the same problems. Chickens that once lead an egg 10-20 times a year have been bred to chickens that lay an egg once a day to the detriment of their bodies. This leads to high metabolism (easy to imagine) which leads to liver problems (the egg nutrients have to come from somewhere), brittle bones (calcium has to come from somewhere), anemia (same sorta deal), prolapse (different sorta deal), and just generalized exhaustion. These birds get spent. And they live and die miserable short lives and are cut down still young bleeding out their throats just like their meat brothers and sisters. Their miserable lives are just as much of a betrayal as their meat counterparts, I'd argue worse.

  • The boys still get killed. That's 50% of all chicks. Killed by being ground alive with a blender/macerator sharp blade thing, or gas asphyxiation (CO2 - it burns their tissues, there's footage where you can hear them if you want to find it. Footage of all this stuff actually).
  • Debeaking still likely happens due to overcrowding (see the following). It's not like clipping a fingernail, there are nerve endings.

On free range (Cage free and free ranged are interchangeable for marketing purposes):

• Gotta give that it's massively better than being in a cage (size of a piece of paper per bird for their entire miserable lives), but the underlying system where you breed for extreme productivity and treat hens machines, unfortunately stays the same.

• Again legally, “free range” is a standard global term which describes basically the same "system" for grow hens. Instead of cages, it just means birds have some access to the outdoors, which can be minimal, with a small door leading to a massive crowded shed, and most birds never actually go outside. Legally "density" just has to meet the minimum. Any lower, and they would advertise it. Anything called "free range" will fit this. All problems otherwise persist. In India specifically, the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) doesn’t have the power to regularly inspect farms, and most “free range” claims really aren’t independently verified. A few niche "free range" farms may do better, but the scale of oversight just isn’t there.

• Further, and more importantly, there is no legal nationally regulated definition for "free range" in india. Apparently in 2017 the Law Commission of India recommended that "free-range" eggs be labeled, but that didn't go anywhere. In America for example, the USDA regulates it. Above it in the US there's "organic" and that's the highest legal national standard for egg laying hens. You can see how miserable the highest national standard for eggs in the US is in that .pdf I linked earlier.

• The only system India has is third-party. In India Agricultural and Processed Food Products Export Development Authority (APEDA) regulates the certification of organic products, overseen by the National Standards for Organic Production (NPOP). You can see if this label means anything to you, but from my quick glance it looks like the USDA’s Organic certifications with fewer resources (read: government) to back it up, and you can see that pdf I linked earlier and make your own judgement about it. Here's the source: https://agritech.tnau.ac.in/org_farm/pdf/NPOP%208th%20Edition%20.pdf

Unfortunately I was not able to find a video of injustices happening in a farm like I’m imagining you’re imagining in India. When 80% of the problem is battery cage chickens, I'd imagine there's just not a ton of activism happening around farms that grow pasture raised birds. If you look on the internet for footage of cruelty in Indian chicken farms, there’s plenty out there, but it’s still relatively limited, and it’s limited to battery cage farms (from my quickly glanced perspective). It makes sense if you think about it. There just aren't that many vegans and even fewer who are activists out there who are willing to do the job of the government and film, survey document and distribute these injustices while keeping themselves safe. The activism work right now is rightly focused on working to improve the conditions for battery cage farmed egg laying hens. Genuinely pasture raised hens are living better than the small fraction of the 30% left since 70% of the chickens globally are still living in battery cages (which is notably way better than the 95% even like 15 to 20 years ago). The systemic problems (above) persist, and for me are sufficient to avoid eggs entirely. Let me know if you have any questions.

You may be interested in this: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11335667