Stray dogs: First, a menace, and now a scam?

A few days ago, an eight year old girl was bitten to death by 15 stray dogs in BEML quarters near Thippasandra. Another horrible tragedy. Which prompts the question: Do you love your children or the stray dogs? Stupid question. But the question actually remains unanswered,, so long as the stray dogs continue to roam freely in your neighbourhood.

After yet another sad victim, the people are beginning to bark at the lack of bite in the government's response to the bark and bite of stray dogs in Bangalore. If you feel like picking a bone, you are welcome to join issue with the Stray Dog Free Bangalore (SDFB), the organization fighting to re-claim the city's roads from the stray dogs that dog us at dawn and dusk.

The stray dogs issue is not stray at all. Some time ago, the Lok Ayukta, after an exhaustive study and detailed public hearings, declared that the stray dogs in Bangalore be destroyed. The Government had then responded with a terse half page memo stating that the Animal Birth Control (ABC) program should be intensified and only sick and rabid dogs should be euthanised.

After this indefensible dilution of the Lok Ayukta's orders, the BMP got into the act to er.. intensify the ABC program". The ABC program has the larger purpose of eliminating the population of stray dogs in the city. The BMP entrusts this job to five NGOs  that are self-acclaimed animal lovers!

Under the BMP plan, the Animal Husbandry Department is supposed to conduct.15,000 sterilizations in 3 months. And the department has made little progress. Meanwhile the public have no recourse to dogs that bark, bite, litter and wander at will.

None of these organizations have given any commitment in writing that the dog population will be zero - not zero growth - in the next one or two years. On the contrary, they have repeatedly implied that the citizens will have to learn with the dogs!

The government has got vast underutilized resources for running the ABC program at no extra cost, excepting the initial investment of making kennels. Where then is the need to award contracts to animal welfare groups, which by the way is not peanuts. It amounts to about Rs 1.2 lakh per zone per month (the city is divided into 10 zones), and a whopping Rs 1.44 crore per year! To repeat this wasteful exercise year after year with no guaranteed time frame perhaps makes sense only to the stray dogs...

Is there any independent supervisory authority for verifying the claims made by these animal welfare groups? No. The SDFB has not been invited to a single monitoring inspection tour and verification of the self-proclaimed targets. SDFC has suggested that payments made to these groups be approved by an independent agency prior to release by the BMPT, but this has not been considered.