Several Indian states observe Mahavir Jayanti as an official gazetted public holiday, and in a number of cities with significant Jain populations, including parts of Gujarat, Rajasthan and Maharashtra, municipal authorities have gone further and mandated the closure of slaughterhouses and, in some cases, restricted the sale of meat and eggs in shops and restaurants for the day, a specific civic accommodation to Jain non-violence principles extended to the entire population of a city or district regardless of individual residents' own religious affiliation or dietary choice.
These closures have occasionally drawn public objection from non-Jain residents and restaurant owners who argue that a civic mandate extending one community's religious dietary restriction to the whole population oversteps what public accommodation of a minority religious observance should require, a live if generally low-key point of friction that surfaces periodically in Indian local politics around Mahavir Jayanti and a small number of other holidays, including some Hindu fasting days, where municipal meat-sale restrictions are imposed on the whole public rather than left to individual observance.
Jain community organisations in many Indian cities also use Mahavir Jayanti as an occasion for blood donation camps and, in some cases, drives promoting eye and organ donation pledges, framing these modern medical forms of giving as a contemporary expression of the same ahimsa and compassion for living beings that the day's animal-release customs and charitable giving have expressed in more traditional forms for centuries.