Reality check on stray dogs

Hindustan Times

4 days ago

The Supreme Court order to civic agencies to round up stray dogs in the national capital region and shift them to shelters, within the next eight weeks, comes against the backdrop of rising dog-bite cases. Between 2022 and 2024, bites reported by the Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme jumped by 1.5 million cases across India — an increase of close to 70%. Notwithstanding the widely varying rabies death estimates, this makes muzzling the threat an imperative. That said, it is hard to imagine the Court's order as any manner of deliverance, or to even expect it to be implemented in full.
After all, the problem is of the making of the very agencies the court now expects to address the crisis. The state government, New Delhi Municipal Corporation (NDMC), and Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) are all to blame, although they may now pretend that the court's order has removed hurdles in the way of their efforts to address the problem. The Court clearly seems to be counting on the ability of these bodies to handle the estimated million strays in the Capital, and has gone ahead and overturned existing policies and even jurisprudence in this belief. But strays, in Delhi and elsewhere in India, are a symbol of implementation failures. First, Delhi hasn't had a dog census since 2009. Second, the management of strays doesn't inspire much faith. To illustrate, the MCD was earlier required to ensure sterilisation and vaccination of strays to stabilise the population. The state of affairs today is clear proof of how badly it has performed. Third, state capacity is woefully inadequate to handle the problem. Delhi lacks permanent shelters that can offer lifetime care to strays and has only 20 animal birth control centres for temporary stays, which can together accommodate a maximum of 4,000-5,000 animals. Four, there's the question of funding both capital and operational overheads — HT's back-of-the-envelope calculation pegs just feeding costs at ₹1,000 crore per year and the cost of the needed number of shelters at ₹10,000 crore. Sheltering of all the NCR strays will require 45 million sq ft of space. If they were to be released in forested areas in the peripheries of the NCR (as feared by animal activists), they could turn feral to survive, with a disastrous fallout for local wildlife.
It is not known whether the Court considered all these issues before issuing an order that, at least on the face of it, blames dogs and dog-lovers for the state of affairs, while the problem is clearly of the making of the government of the UT, NDMC, and MCD. The solution may lie in concurrent implementation of incremental and comprehensive measures, such as scaling up of sterilisation and vaccination to levels required for population stabilisation, setting up of dog pounds, rehabilitation including adoption, and regular clearing of garbage — dump sites are important sources of food for stray dogs and also engender aggressive behaviour.