Best of Both Sides: SC order on stray dogs overlooks that compassion is what makes a city a home

Indian Express

a day ago

A month ago, I carried five tiny kittens home from the street. They were stranded in a house about to be demolished, shivering, hungry, and still too young to eat on their own. Today, they are healthy, curious, and very sure they own my home. It is astonishing how quickly an animal can change when it is given care.
This week's Supreme Court order that every street dog in Delhi be relocated to a shelter within eight weeks is, at its heart, about care — or rather, the lack of it. Yes, the threat of rabies is real. Yes, we need solutions to incidents of aggression and population growth. But there is a difference between solving a problem and sweeping it out of sight.
Even if the order were legally sound, the reality on the ground makes it impossible to execute. To begin with, we don't know exactly how many dogs there are in Delhi. There hasn't been a count in 10 years.
The 'estimate' offered by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi is around 8 lakh. Against those numbers, Delhi has just 20 temporary shelters, none of them government-run. Building and running enough facilities to house every dog would cost crores. We struggle to build bridges for decades, yet we are expected to build and staff thousands of shelters in two months.
Ironically, the same MCD that has already failed to meet sterilisation targets and hasn't supplied anti-rabies vaccines in the numbers needed is now being tasked with the creation of humane shelters. Not once has the Court asked the civic body for accountability.
But the most important reason to doubt the effectiveness of this order is neither legal nor logistical, it's logical. Mass removal simply doesn't work. We know this from Turkey, where a similar programme descended into mass culling, only for the stray population to rebound. The sterilise-vaccinate-return approach, enshrined in Indian law, exists because it works. Remove the dogs who already have a place, and you create space for new ones who don't.
If the intent is to curb rabies cases in Delhi, then this order does more harm than good. To start with, panic fanned by WhatsApp messages declares that 2,000 people die of rabies every day in the national capital. Yet, the government's own figures — given in a reply to a question in the Lok Sabha just months ago — tell a very different story. According to official data, in 2024, there were 54 'suspected human rabies deaths' in the entire country — none from Delhi.
The root cause of death by rabies is the shortage of rabies vaccines at government hospitals. Sending every single stray to a shelter cannot be a one-stop solution to India's rabies crisis. Look at Romania, where, after shelters were filled and streets emptied, unsterilised and unvaccinated dogs moved into the emptied territories.
Beyond the failures of policy and denial of science, though, there is something more troubling: The absence of care. Article 51A(g) of our Constitution, which asks us to show compassion to all living creatures, is meant to shape how we live and the principles we live by.
The persistent caricature of those who oppose this verdict is the elite South Delhi aunty, feeding pedigreed dogs in her gated colony. In truth, most community dogs live in less privileged neighbourhoods, sustained by families who cannot keep them inside their small homes but still take responsibility for them. I think of a friend who found a dog abandoned outside his home. He took the dog in, not into his house but into his life. Neighbours feed him. Someone else covers the cost of vaccinations. In winter, children in the lane make sure he has a blanket. This is what a community of care looks like: Fragile, improvised, but deeply human.
The real cause of Delhi's stray population is abandonment. What happens when the dog bought for a child's birthday is dumped a year later? When he mates with another discarded pet, producing a litter born into homelessness? The owners face no penalty. But the puppies will be rounded up, sent to overcrowded shelters, where they will disappear.
Even if Delhi somehow found the space and money overnight, removing sterilised, vaccinated dogs from their territories will undo years of rabies control and leave the streets more unsafe.
The alternative is not a mystery. It is in our laws already: Large-scale sterilisation and vaccination, strict enforcement against illegal breeding and abandonment, public education on responsible pet ownership, and support for communities that care for animals where they are.
The Supreme Court may have, in all its wisdom, passed the order that it has. Yet, the Chief Minister still has the chance to step in and stop an unworkable, unlawful order from taking effect — and to choose care over cruelty disguised as efficiency.
Inhumanity is easy. It is also a sign of our times. But care — for each other, for the animals who live alongside us — is what makes a city worth calling home.
The writer is national spokesperson, NCP (SP)