India’s experience shows that even a flawed implementation of the Animal Birth Control (Dog) Rules can bring down the population of stray dogs. The message is clear — improved implementation of these is the only way out
According to a report in The Hindu’s Delhi edition dated March 29, 2025, Congress MP, Karti Chidambaram, met the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, on Friday, March 28, 2025, to raise “health and security concerns posed by stray dogs.” Carried under the heading “Karti meets PM, flags safety concerns over menace of stray dogs,” it does not give details of what Chidambaram said, except that he suggested the creation of a national task force to deal with the problem and emphasised that urgent action was needed to address the inadequate implementation of the Animal Birth Control Rules 2023. The local bodies responsible for it lacked the resources, funds and technology to deal with the issue effectively.
The Animal Birth Control Rules 2023 provide for stray dogs to be picked up, neutered, vaccinated and returned to the respective places form which they had been taken. One has no cause for quarrel with Chidambaram if his call was for urgent action to remove the factors responsible for their inadequate implementation. Nor can one object to his proposal for the creation of a national special task force if the latter was meant to engage with this task. One, however, rather not go beyond stating this this, as the report does not give a detailed and comprehensive account of what he had said.
One, however, needs to comment on two statements which, pace the report, he had made. Stating that India had one of the largest populations of stray dogs in the world, he put their number at 6.2 crore. The second was his telling PM Modi that rabies was endemic in India, which accounted for 36 per cent of the worlds’ rabies-related deaths. While the first half of the first statements is correct, the figure given in the second half is not. Then Union Minister of Fisheries, Animal Husbandry and Dairying, Parshottam Rupala, told the Lok Sabha on August 2, 2022, that the number of street dogs in India was 1.53 crore in 2019 against 1.71 crore in 2012.
Not only was the number of stray dogs in 2019 much lower than 6.2 crore, it marked a decline of 18 lakh compared to the 2012 figure of 1.71 crore. The trend seems to be continuing since then. While all-India statistics are not publicly available, the ones that are, confirm this. According to a report by Anagha published in India Today (last updated on September 14, 2023) under the heading “Bengaluru stray dog population reduced by 31K in four years: Civic body survey,” a survey conducted by the Bruhut Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike had revealed that the number of stray dogs in the city had decreased by 31,000 in the four years since 2019. Also, according to a report (updated on September 7, 2023) by Munishwar A Sagar in The Times of India, Chandigarh’s stray dog population had declined by 26 per cent — from 12,922 to 9,503 — between 2018 and 2023.
As for the incidence of rabies, the report in The Hindu does not mention the source of Chidambaram’s statistics. He had most probably gone by World Health Organisation’s fact sheet, “Rabies in India.” The latter states, “India is endemic for rabies and accounts for 36 per cent of the world’s rabies deaths. True burden of rabies in India is not fully known, although as per available information, it causes 18 000-20,000 deaths every year.” The WHO, however, is not sure of the figure for deaths it cited. This is evident from his admission that the “true burden of rabies is not fully known.”
The alarmingly high statistics cited by many are wide of the mark. According to a report by Times News Network, published under the heading “307 died of rabies in India last year, max 48 in Delhi” (updated on July 27, 2025), rabies caused the deaths of 307 persons in India in 2022.
This information, the report said, was shared by the Union Minister of State for Health and Family Welfare, SP Singh Baghel, during the Monsoon session of the Lok Sabha in response to a question by Dean Kuriakose, a Congress MP.
A report by Jitendra Choubey, published in the New Indian Express under the heading, “India reports 22 lakh dog bite cases in 2024, 48 deaths raise concerns over rabies-free goal” (last updated on February 5, 2025), stated that cases of dog bites numbered around 22 lakh and of those by other animals, including monkeys, over five lakh, in 2024. These accounted for 48 death which, it is important to note, were caused not just by dogs but other animals as well. Other statistics are also significant. Since 2005, the Union Government’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s Central Bureau of Health Intelligence (CBHI) has been annually publishing a National Health Profile for the country. According to its 2023 edition, the total number of human deaths in India from rabies was 43 and 28 in calendar years 2022 and 2021 respectively. According to the 2022 edition, the same figure was 15 in 2020. These figures mark a steep decline in the number of human deaths from rabies compared to a few years earlier. For example, according to the 2018 edition, there were 97 cases of human deaths from rabies countrywide in 2017. According to the relevant preceding annual National Health Profiles, there were 86 human deaths from rabies in 2016, 113 in 2015, 125 in 2014 and 132 in 2013. Nor did the figures even remotely approach 18000-20000, which the World Bank mentioned. There, for example, were 386, 365 and 485 deaths from rabies in 1997, 1998 and 1999 respectively. The number was 486 in 2000 and 488 in 2001.
Also, pet and not stray dogs are responsible for biting in a large number of cases. A recognition of this is implicit in a directive issued by the Director General of Health Services in the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to all public health centres, community health centres, district hospitals and tertiary provide care facilities to specific, quality data on dog bites including those by strays and pets. The report by Nikhil Ghanekar, datelined March 17, 2024 and published in The Indian Express, which said this further stated that the directive followed an increase in the number of dog bites as well as a representation by the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) seeking segregated recording of data to improve public health tracking and resolution of dog bites.
The AWBI stated in its representation that the absence of specific segregated data had led to the assumption that most dog bites were caused by strays.
Segregation would not only ensure a better understanding of the distribution of dog bite cases and greater accountability and responsibility on the part of the owners of pet dogs.
Finally, despite inadequate implementation, the fact remains that the ABC programme constitutes the only effective and humane method of controlling stray dog populations. In its report, Technical Report Series 931, WHO’s Expert Consultation on Rabies, which met in Geneva from October 5 to 8, 2004, states, “Since the 1960s, ABC programmes coupled with rabies vaccination have been advocated as a method to control urban street male and female dog populations and ultimately human rabies in Asia.”
This is hardly surprising. India’s experience shows that even a flawed implementation of the Animal Birth Control (Dog) Rules can bring down the population of stray dogs. The message is clear-accelerated and improved implementation of these is the only way out.
(The writer is the Consulting Editor with The Pioneer. Views expressed are personal)
