India’s stray dog crisis is fundamentally a governance failure in public health and urban management, not a simplistic humans-versus-dogs moral battle. Reframing it this way erodes space for data-driven solutions and meaningful accountability.
India today carries an extraordinary share of the global rabies burden, accounting for nearly 36% of human rabies deaths worldwide. Government figures record over 37 lakh dog bite cases in 2024 alone, with at least 54 suspected human rabies deaths in that period. The crisis is particularly severe in states like Tamil Nadu, which reported around 5.25 lakh dog bite incidents and 28 rabies deaths the previous year. In Tamil Nadu, pet dogs, not strays, were responsible for nearly 30% of rabies deaths over the last ten years. These numbers are not merely statistical markers. They point to a serious, ongoing public health emergency that exposes deep systemic failures in surveillance, prevention, and urban animal management.
Against this stark backdrop, the Supreme Court has repeatedly tried to steer the conversation away from a simplistic “dogs versus humans” narrative. Yet executive and local responses frequently drift in precisely that direction. Under media and public pressure, several states have adopted unsustainable or unlawful measures, ranging from indiscriminate removals to outright killings. In one particularly troubling instance, authorities in Bihar’s Begusarai district ordered the shooting of at least 24 dogs in 2023 following a series of local attacks. More recently, around 500 dogs were allegedly poisoned in Telangana’s Kamareddy and Hanamkonda districts. Such reactive violence may briefly appease public anger, but it does nothing to address structural gaps in urban animal governance or public health planning.
The Animal Birth Control (ABC) rules are grounded in behavioural ecology and international best practices. They mandate sterilisation and vaccination of street dogs, not culling. Multiple empirical studies, including those aligned with World Health Organisation guidance, show that neuter-vaccinate-return programmes reduce dog population growth and help stabilise behaviour over time. The underlying logic is behavioural, not sentimental.
The central failure, therefore, is not conceptual but institutional. India has the right legal and technical model, but falls short on implementation. Municipal corporations across the country rarely meet sterilisation targets. Many lack trained veterinarians, adequate infrastructure, or up-to-date dog census data. Standardised reporting on sterilisation rates or vaccine coverage is weak to non-existent, making it difficult to track progress or identify gaps. Chennai illustrates these problems starkly. The city’s stray dog population is reported to have risen from about 57,000 in 2018 to over 1.81 lakh by 2024, with only around 27% of these dogs sterilised. This leaves a large fertile population, and the underlying reasons include contractor disputes, staff shortages, and administrative interruptions, even as dog-bite cases continue to climb.
Public budgets are announced regularly, but their utilisation remains opaque. There is little clarity on how much of the allocated funding for ABC programmes is actually spent, how it is deployed, or whether private agencies and contractors are held accountable when they underperform. In practice, a significant share of the operational burden is shifted onto under-resourced NGOs and volunteers.
In this context, repeated judicial or administrative calls to “remove dogs from streets” or “place them in shelters” can sound decisive but collapse under closer scrutiny. Sheltering is not a simple or neutral administrative act. It is capital, land, and labour-intensive. One estimate suggested that housing Delhi’s roughly 10 lakh street dogs would require around Rs 10,000 crore, a figure that would consume more than half of the city’s annual development budget. No civic body in India currently has the financial, spatial, or human capacity to shelter animals at anything near this scale.
Worse, orders for removal without corresponding investments in infrastructure and systems risk producing perverse outcomes. They can legitimise vigilantism, encourage illegal capture or killing, intensify hostility towards feeders and animal welfare workers, and push problems out of sight rather than resolving them. Some cities are experimenting with small-scale shelter responses. Belagavi, for example, is constructing facilities for around 700 to 800 dogs. Yet this represents only a fraction of what would be required even to stabilise that city’s street dog population.
Comparative experience from other countries underscores these lessons. The Netherlands has achieved near-zero stray dog populations not through mass confinement but through decades of sustained sterilisation drives, strict pet ownership rules, penalties for abandonment, and proactive adoption campaigns. Bhutan’s 14-year government–NGO programme sterilised and vaccinated nearly all free-roaming dogs in the country, demonstrating measurable reductions in rabies and improvements in dog population stability. Across these examples, the constant themes are persistence, policy continuity, and the integration of data, budgets, and citizen participation, rather than quick fixes.
India’s ABC model is conceptually aligned with this global experience. The problem lies in the implementation chain: infrequent or incomplete dog population surveys, modest sterilisation coverage, irregular vaccination intervals, and poor monitoring. Without reliable baseline data and routine measurement, municipalities cannot assess whether their interventions are effective or cost-effective. Official bite databases rarely distinguish between incidents involving stray, pet, or feral dogs, leaving policymakers blind to the true distribution of risk. National and state health authorities need to harmonise reporting systems, publish sterilisation and vaccination ratios, and create transparent, public-facing portals to track ABC performance.
This dynamic is visible in the current push for “common feeding zones.” Chennai’s decision to designate specific feeding areas for stray dogs, framed as Supreme Court compliance, aims to tidy conflict but ignores street dogs’ territorial nature. Concentrating packs at shared sites heightens competition, fights, and aggression, merely relocating risk to host neighbourhoods rather than resolving it. What appears orderly on paper can create new conflicts among residents and animals, thereby undermining the goal of peaceful coexistence that the policy claims to support.
Institutional responsibility must also be reconsidered. Animal birth control and rabies management cannot remain confined within underfunded municipal veterinary wings. They must be integrated into broader public health systems, epidemiological monitoring frameworks, and urban planning processes. A coordinated architecture linking municipal corporations, health departments, animal husbandry agencies, and local communities would move the conversation from emotional rhetoric to measurable outcomes.
There is no disagreement that human life is paramount. Every rabies death represents a profound failure of institutions and a preventable tragedy. Recognising the primacy of human life, however, does not justify indiscriminate removal, cruelty, or collective punishment of animals. Treating dogs as expendable obstacles to safety reflects not robust governance but impatience with the hard work of building systems.
Dr Maya K is Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru; Pavithra Rajasekaran is beVisioneers: Mercedes-Benz Fellow working on a stray dogs’ nutrition project