"PETA India is eager to help universities and other schools take the lead in teaching biology using humane and modern methods", PETA India Science Policy Adviser Dr Chaitanya Koduri said.
Punflay's 'virtual frog dissection app' available for desktops, laptops, Macs, iPads, netbooks and interactive whiteboards, simulates dissection with life-like graphics that offer a bloodless field, colour differentiation and clarity that cannot be achieved with animal dissection.
The move comes after new guidelines were issued by the Ministry of Environment and Forests and the University Grants Commission (UGC) to replace animal dissection in life-sciences education, under pressure from animal rights activists led by PETA.
However, the decision has drawn criticism from biology teachers, who fear that the ruling will hamper anatomy lessons, producing a generation of researchers without appropriate laboratory skills.
The rationale for the ban on animal testing has perplexed teachers such as Birendra Nath Mallick, a neurobiologist at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi.
For instance, the University Grants Commission (UGC) guidelines say that because anatomical knowledge has been expanded through advances in other branches of biology, there is now "an over-emphasis of learning of anatomy as laboratory exercises"