Dakhma exposure has become substantially harder to sustain in recent decades, chiefly because of a catastrophic, well documented collapse in South Asian vulture populations from the 1990s onward, caused by the veterinary drug diclofenac entering the food chain through livestock carcasses, which removed the birds the practice depends on to complete the process quickly and left bodies at some towers of silence, particularly in Mumbai, decomposing far more slowly and visibly than the tradition intends. That ecological crisis has forced the Parsi community, the Zoroastrian community of India descended from migrants from Iran, into difficult and genuinely divided debate over how to respond, with some authorities supporting solar concentrators to accelerate decomposition and others, more reluctantly, accepting cremation or burial for at least some of their dead, a shift traditionalists within the community have opposed as a departure from correctly maintained practice.
Iranian Zoroastrians largely abandoned dakhma exposure earlier, under twentieth century government pressure and changing urban conditions, shifting mostly to burial in concrete lined graves designed to minimise earth contact, a compromise solution distinct from the towers of silence still standing, though increasingly contested in their use, in India today. The practice remains a live and unresolved point of internal Zoroastrian debate rather than a settled question either way.