Stray dogs being picked up at random: Citizens to KMC
Times of India | 10 January 2025
12 Kolkata: Last week, Rachana Ghosh had a nightmarish experience when she discovered that her favourite pet dog Bhodu, who lived on the street in her neighbourhood, had gone missing. So distraught was the lawyer who resides in Behala that she took up the matter with a local KMC official. The dog was later traced to the Dhapa pound and returned to the neighbourhood.
Similarly, Amitava Pal, a retired teacher from Tollygunge, registered a complaint at a police station seeking help in finding a male dog which had gone missing from the vicinity of his house in the Moore Avenue area. He used to regularly feed the dog that is yet to be traced.
Sources in civic body said the dogs from Behala and Tollygunge had been picked up by KMC that has suddenly gone into a vaccination-and-sterilisation overdrive in a bid to reach an impossible target. After being launched amid much fanfare in March 2022, the project for the city's stray dogs has been a near non-starter with only 10% of the target being met in two and a half years. The city has around 84,000 stray dogs.
According to a KMC source, to compensate for the time lost, the civic body's workers engaged in the special project have started picking up stray dogs indiscriminately, without informing local caregivers.
The state sanctioned Rs 86 lakh for this special project in 2022 and set a one-year deadline for the KMC health department. According to a KMC health department official, after a formal inauguration of the special project, the work of vaccination and sterilisation proceeded at snail's pace. While the KMC health department workers were supposed to bring all 84,000 stray dogs under the vaccination project, they needed to sterilise 60% of the total dog population.
According to a KMC official associated with the vaccination and sterilisation initiative, the special, time-bound project has become a non-starter for want of infrastructure and manpower. Also, a mismatch of borough-wise records of strays is proving to be an obstacle, said a civic official. He added that borough-wise officials will be asked to extend a helping hand to expedite the vaccination and sterilisation project.
"Vaccination and sterilisation of stray dogs across the city is a massive task. If we want to implement the project successfully, we need to upgrade the infrastructure of the Dhapa dog pound immediately. Inundation of the pound has been a major problem. If we can't do it before monsoon, the vaccination and sterilisation tasks will get hampered," the civic official said. The Dhapa dog pound has the capacity to keep 250 dogs for vaccination and sterilisation.
Besides the Dhapa dog pound, the KMC has a kennel facility at Entally that can be used to keep stray dogs during the vaccination-and-sterilisation drive. In the Dhapa and Entally dog pounds, together, the KMC health department can keep 300 dogs at one go.