Beginning Oct. 1, the Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) will trace owners of abandoned dogs and impose a penalty of Rs 10,000 on them. They will be identified through the mandatory microchips implanted in licensed dogs. The municipality began microchipping licensed pets in November last year. The chips store details such as the animal’s unique ID, breed, sex, colour, and vaccination status and link to a database containing the owner’s address.

As both an effort to curb pet abandonment, which is cruel, and address the problem of stray dogs, which is a major public concern, this move by GCC is welcome if implemented well. For ease of operation, GCC dog-catching squads will be armed with RFID readers to identify the errant owners and POS devices to penalise them on the spot.The GCC database has 78,238 licensed pet owners at last count. There are no numbers for abandoned dogs in Chennai, nor for any other Indian city. Estimates for homeless dogs in India top 60 million. In a limited study done in 2021, India scored poorly on the Pet Homelessness Index, with 82% of dogs considered homeless, abandoned or feral. India had the highest pet relinquishment level among the nine countries surveyed. Ambivalence towards an abandoned pet’s fate was staggeringly high; 34% of the respondents admitted they have left a dog to fend for itself in the streets.Abandonment of licensed pets contributes only a small number to the street dog phenomenon in Chennai.

Abandoned unlicensed pets would be considerably higher, which these penalties might not cover because their owners would be harder to trace. The GCC reported to the Madras High Court in 2024 that there are an estimated 1.80 lakh street dogs across its 15 zones, 73% of them unsterilised. Considering that street dogs are vastly more in number than licensed pets, and abandoned pets are a small proportion of that subset, the GCC’s penalties are likely to act as a deterrent to irresponsible owners but make only a small dent on the wider public health problem posed by street dogs. Therefore, to be more impactful, GCC needs to increase the sterilisation rate in zones where the street dog population is high, but sterilisation is low.Penalties for abandoning pets are a natural next step after introducing mandatory microchipping at the licensing stage. GCC is among the first municipalities in India to take that step. It is to be hoped that implementation will be strict. In countries where such penalties have been imposed, no exceptions are allowed; in Singapore, the penalties are stiff, and there is the threat of a prison sentence to boot. As a pioneer in this initiative, Chennai has the opportunity to demonstrate the efficiency of its design. It is common for municipalities in India to announce civic penalties with much fanfare but chicken out on enforcement. Anti-littering fines are an example of such fiats without serious intent. Dehradun, for instance, announced penalties for pet abandonment earlier this year but went overboard by adding on more unimplementable mandates. It made it compulsory for residential welfare societies to keep a record of pet owners and limited the number of pets that can be kept to four. To get the best results, Chennai needs to keep the penalties simple, enforce them firmly, and concurrently step up its vaccination and sterilisation drives.