Opinion | Top Court's Stray Dogs Order Can Cost A Fortune. But That's Not The Point

Housing Delhi's 10 lakh dogs would require at least Rs 10,000 crore in construction alone, more than half of Delhi's entire Rs 17,224 crore capital outlay for all development in 2025-26.

Opinion | Top Court's Stray Dogs Order Can Cost A Fortune. But That's Not The Point

The Hon'ble Supreme Court's sweeping order to remove every street dog from Delhi's streets rests on a false premise. The case began suo motu after newspaper reports claimed that a young girl had died of rabies following a dog bite; in truth, she had died of meningitis. To craft a policy on the back of a factual error is to invite catastrophe, and, in this case, it risks not only a public health and animal welfare disaster, but also the collapse of decades of proven evidence-based policy.

We have been here before, and history has already delivered its verdict. The very idea of "cleansing" our streets of dogs was imported from British colonial rule, which treated free-roaming animals as vermin to be eliminated rather than sentient beings who had long lived alongside us. For millennia, India's towns and villages have shared their spaces with dogs, embodying a tradition rooted in ahimsa and karuna, values so intrinsic to our civilisation that they have found explicit recognition in our Constitution. This deep-rooted coexistence was never a weakness; it was part of our cultural and civilisational strength.

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A Colonial-Era Mistake

Yet, when the British left, the playbook they introduced remained. For decades after Independence, Indian cities waged the same futile campaigns to "clean" the streets by capturing dogs en masse, killing them indiscriminately, or warehousing them out of sight. Not once, in any city or era, has the mass rounding up of dogs succeeded in eliminating street populations or controlling rabies. The logic seemed simple: remove the dogs, remove the problem. But time and again, the strategy collapsed under its own weight. Newly emptied areas triggered the "vacuum effect", drawing in fresh, unvaccinated dogs from surrounding areas. Breeding resumed unchecked, rabies continued to claim human and animal lives, and the cycle of capture and killing began anew.

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Animal Birth Control (Dog) Rules, 2001, superseded by Animal Birth Control Rules 2023, were forged in the crucible of this historical failure, mandating sterilisation and vaccination of street dogs, followed by their return to their original territories, creating stable, immunised populations that would neither reproduce nor admit unvaccinated outsiders.

Rejection Of Science

The Hon'ble  Supreme Court itself has, over the years, repeatedly upheld animal birth control as the only scientifically and legally sound solution for rabies elimination and dog population management, one that is entirely consistent with the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organisation for Animal Health. 

To dismantle this architecture of evidence-based policy in favour of a failed colonial relic is not merely regressive; it is a rejection of science, of our constitutional commitment to compassion, and of the centuries-old ethos of coexistence that has defined India. And yet, if we are now determined to repeat a failed experiment, let us at least be honest that it is a practical absurdity so immense that it would not survive the first contact with reality.

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Where would the money for this grand 'purge' come from? In the labyrinth of Delhi's fiscal planning, where every penny is clawed from competing priorities, whether it's repairing roads, building hospitals, empowering women, keeping the city running or cleaning the Yamuna, the apex court's idea of warehousing every street dog is not policy, it is fiscal nightmare. Pull it into the balance sheet, and it doesn't just distort priorities, it devours them whole like a black hole.

The Absurdity, In Numbers

The numbers make the absurdity plain. Housing Delhi's 10 lakh dogs would require at least Rs 10,000 crore in construction alone, more than half of Delhi's entire Rs 17,224 crore capital outlay for all development in 2025-26. This is the budget for the whole of Delhi, for the whole year - not a municipal purse that can be magically dipped into. Feeding those dogs, even at the Animal Welfare Board's modest budget of Rs 30-Rs 40 per animal per day, would cost around Rs 1,500 crore annually. Catching and initial transport alone will cost roughly Rs 20 crore, again based on standard Animal Welfare Board of India-linked rates for field work; this is before even touching the recurring costs of veterinary care, handlers, electricity, waste disposal, staff salary, etc.

And where would the government cut corners? Cut hospital beds? Shelve school upgrades? Defer metro expansions? Strip grants to the Delhi Transport Corporation? The truth is, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's budget cannot sustain even a fraction of such an undertaking. Even the Delhi government cannot reallocate funds on this scale without gutting essential services. Attempting it would be detonating a fiscal time bomb at the heart of the city's development plan, replacing clean water, safe transport, and functioning drains with overcrowded, disease-infested, crammed warehouses for dogs that solve nothing and consume everything. The cheaper, and only proven path remains mass sterilisation and vaccination and community engagement. 

A Barrage Of Problems

Even if these Sisyphean fiscal obstacles were somehow overcome, the proposed shelters would rapidly degenerate into epidemiological tinderboxes. Confining lakhs of stressed, immunocompromised dogs in hastily erected, overcrowded facilities creates the perfect crucible for zoonotic diseases. These warehouses wouldn't isolate a problem; they would amplify it, creating concentrated reservoirs of disease that would inevitably spill back into human population through staff, contaminated runoff, escaped animals and the porous boundaries of any urban shelter system. Delhi's 3.5 crore residents would face not reduced risk but an unprecedented public health siege emanating from state-sanctioned hotspots for unintended epidemics.

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Meanwhile, the ecological disruption caused by this mass removal will disturb the delicate balance of Delhi's urban ecosystem in ways that are impossible to ignore. Street dogs serve as natural predators in the urban food chain, helping to control populations of rats and other small mammals that thrive on the city's abundant waste. Their sudden absence will inevitably alter these established relationships, creating space for less manageable pest species that carry their own public health risks, from plague and leptospirosis to hantavirus and salmonellosis. This policy gambit is a reckless endangerment of Delhi's populace, trading a managed, evidence-based approach of animal birth control for a chain reaction of ecological imbalance and heightened human disease risk.

Unravelling Of Compassion

Beyond the fiscal absurdity and epidemiological risk lies a deeper wound: the unravelling of the quiet bonds of compassion that have stitched together our fractured urban existence. For decades, the care of street dogs has sustained an unspoken covenant, with neighbours synchronising feeding rounds, strangers pooling money to rush an injured animal to the hospital, shopkeepers giving shelter to pups in the monsoon, and children learning their first lessons in empathy from the guardianship of a mother dog who belongs to no one and to everyone. These moments, unnoticed by any ledger, have crossed the hard lines of class, creed, and language, creating tiny sanctuaries of trust in streets otherwise bristling with indifference. To criminalise this instinct is more than policy failure; it is betrayal. It casts the compassionate as offenders and has created an atmosphere of fear and paranoia. In an age when human connection is thinning into nothing more than transactions, tearing away one of our last spontaneous communities is to vandalise our own social fabric. The street dog is not just an animal; it is the living stitch in the tapestry of mutual care. 

Yet, in the hands that feed, shelter, and heal lies the remedy to this rupture, if only governance would recognise and honour its constitutional allies. The failure of Animal Birth Control is not a verdict on its science, but a mirror to our institutional mediocrity. Managing the street dog population and eradicating rabies does not demand the elimination of dogs from the streets, but a return to the spirit of compassion wedded to competence, where policy meets the discipline of evidence-based action.

Implement Existing Rules First

India's rabies control architecture lies in ruins not from policy voids, but from the state's deliberate subversion of its own mandates. The National Action Plan for Rabies Elimination, scientifically calibrated to eradicate dog-mediated rabies by 2030, remains a parchment promise, starved of funding and crippled by absent state-centre coordination. Vaccination coverage of the stray dog population remains inadequate to establish effective herd immunity, while most districts lack comprehensive surveillance systems to monitor and respond to outbreaks.

The Directorate General of Health Services under the Health Ministry has issued a comprehensive order to strengthen rabies control. The directive mandates hospitals and healthcare providers to provide quality data on animal bites, specifically distinguishing between bites from pet and stray dogs, and to maintain a dedicated Animal Bite Exposure (ABE) Register. The order also requires facilities to ensure the availability of Anti-Rabies Vaccines (ARV) and Sera (ARS), maintain an Adverse Event Following Immunization (AEFI) registry, investigate all suspected rabies deaths, and share bite and case data fortnightly with veterinary authorities. This data collection is essential for effective surveillance, timely post-exposure prophylaxis administration, and focused vaccination campaigns. However, these compliances remain largely unimplemented, ensuring that policy decisions continue to be made on muddled data that confounds the very sources of the problem authorities claim to address. These parallel failures reveal a pattern; we have the policies but lack the political will to execute them with the rigour they demand.

Nowhere is this institutional betrayal more visceral than in Delhi's Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme, where, by early 2025, four of the city's twenty ABC centres lay shuttered, and those still operating reeked of dysfunction. In fact, many padded their records with sterilisation figures for surgeries that never happened.

Law Is A Myth Here

This systematic corruption is compounded by the unchecked and illegal pet breeding and abandonment pipeline that continuously replenishes street populations even as Animal Birth Control efforts struggle to contain them, with unregistered breeders and pet shops operating illegally and with impunity despite clear provisions in the Dog Breeding and Marketing Rules, 2017, and Pet Shop Rules, 2018, requiring State Animal Welfare Board registration.

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True reform demands Animal Birth Control implementation on war footing with proper execution of existing protocols: functional State ABC Monitoring Committees for monitoring and oversight, gap analysis and performance reviews of all 20 centres; zone-wise allocation of sterilisation, ensuring 80% coverage before territorial advancement with female-centric sterilisation targeting 70% of operations; mandatory Animal Welfare Board of India registration for all implementing agencies; specialised training for veterinarians and handlers at recognised training centres; establishment of animal helplines at each Animal Birth Control Centre; keeping proper bite case protocols; immediate closure of unregistered pet shops and dog breeding establishments; transformation of Delhi's 77 veterinary hospitals into in-patient facilities for injured street animals; closure of every illegal pet shops and dog boarding establishments, and promotion of street dog adoption through shelters with post-adoption support. These are not ambitious proposals but basic compliance measures requiring proper implementation and can be achieved by a fraction of the monstrous cost required for mass removal. 

Devise Actual Solutions

The Hon'ble Court's order serves no purpose but perpetuates failed colonial methods. The choice before us is not between dogs and humans, but between competence and chaos, between the patient work of sterilisation that eliminates rabies and controls street dog population and the colonial theatrics of elimination that eliminates nothing. Because the policy is impossible to implement at scale, Delhi will end up with dogs both on the streets and crammed into disease-prone warehouses, doubling the problem instead of solving it. What Delhi needs is not compliance with this misguided order, but solutions that actually work. The Hon'ble Court may have spoken, but history, science, and compassion speak louder. In the end, the systemic failure to implement proven solutions is the problem; not the animals who have shared our streets for millennia.

(Gauri Maulekhi is an animal welfare activist. She is the Trustee of People for Animals, India's largest animal welfare organisation, founded by Maneka Gandhi, Member of Parliament, Lok Sabha)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author

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