Nagpur’s Stray Dog Population Rises Even After 40,000 Sterilisations

thenewsdirt
Aug 1
12 min read

Nagpur, the largest city in Maharashtra’s Vidarbha region, is grappling with a burgeoning stray dog population that remains stubbornly high despite sustained sterilisation campaigns.

Packs of street dogs roam virtually every neighbourhood, and their growing numbers have become a daily concern for residents. In recent years, city authorities have ramped up Animal Birth Control (ABC) programs to neuter and vaccinate stray canines on a large scale.

Yet the streets of Nagpur are still home to tens of thousands of strays, and incidents of dog bites and attacks continue to make headlines.

The question that looms large is why these sterilisation efforts have not translated into a clear decline in the dog population? The answers reveal a complex mix of logistical challenges, past missteps, and legal constraints that together have blunted the impact of an otherwise humane and scientifically sound strategy.

Rising Stray Population and Public Alarm

By all accounts, Nagpur’s stray dog population has reached alarming levels. Civic surveys estimate that around 90,000 stray dogs roam the city’s 10 zones, roughly 3% of Nagpur’s human population.

This figure represents a slight increase from about 85,000 strays counted a few years ago, indicating that the dog population has not been brought under control.

The consequences of so many dogs on the streets are felt by citizens daily. Dog bite incidents are rising, and sometimes severe.

City records obtained through a Right to Information query show that over 58,000 cases of stray dog bites were reported in Nagpur over a six-and-a-half-year period, with nearly ten thousand bite incidents in the worst years.

Such numbers underline the public health risk, hospitals administer tens of thousands of anti-rabies injections each year to bite victims.

Tragically, some encounters have turned fatal or near-fatal, sparking public anger. In May 2023, a three-year-old boy in a Nagpur suburb was fatally mauled by a pack of dogs, a case that shocked the city and highlighted the stakes of the problem. In another incident, a 72-year-old woman out on a morning walk suffered a fractured back and multiple bite wounds after being knocked down by strays.

Stories of children or cyclists being chased and menaced by dogs surface regularly, feeding a sense of alarm. Residents in many localities describe living in fear of aggressive dog packs, especially at dawn or late at night. The “stray dog menace”, as local headlines often dub it, has led to street protests and heated debates between neighbourhoods and animal welfare groups.

Frustrated citizens demand immediate relief, sometimes calling for drastic measures, whereas animal activists urge humane control and blame poor implementation for the crisis. This clash of perspectives has only grown sharper as the dog population swells across Nagpur and nearby parts of Vidarbha.

A public interest litigation filed in 2022 cited the surge in dog attacks and accused authorities of inaction.

Taking note, the Nagpur Bench of the Bombay High Court (which serves the Vidarbha region) has pressed officials for answers. Judges have repeatedly summoned municipal and police officers to explain why stray dogs still terrorise many areas.

In one stern hearing, the bench questioned, “How many times must we repeat ourselves?” after a petitioner recounted a horrific incident of a child falling to his death while fleeing an attacking dog.

The judiciary’s involvement underscores how controlling the stray dog population is now seen as a public safety priority, not just an animal management issue.

Sterilisation Efforts Ramp Up

On paper, Nagpur’s primary strategy for curbing stray dogs is the Animal Birth Control (ABC) program, centred on large-scale sterilisation and vaccination drives.

Over the past two years, the Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) has significantly expanded these efforts.

Since May 2023, nearly 40,000 stray dogs have been sterilised in the city, an unprecedented push averaging about 60–70 surgeries every single day.

To achieve this, the NMC partnered with multiple animal welfare organisations and set up three sterilisation centres across Nagpur (at Bhandewadi, Gorewada, and Maharajbagh). Each centre operates with veterinary surgeons and support staff, catching stray dogs from various localities, performing spay/neuter surgeries, inoculating them against rabies, and then releasing them back to the same areas after recovery.

This intensified campaign is a marked change from the past when sterilisations were done in a more sporadic, limited fashion. For instance, a few years ago, the city had only a single functional sterilisation clinic handling modest numbers of dogs.

An RTI disclosure showed that in 2017-18, the municipal hospital managed to sterilise merely 67 dogs, and even with an outsourced NGO’s help, only a few thousand dogs were neutered annually up to 2020.

That scale was woefully inadequate for a population in the tens of thousands. Recognising this, the NMC ramped up funding and infrastructure for ABC. The budget for sterilizations increased (the cost per surgery has roughly doubled from ₹700 to about ₹1,600 now), and private veterinary groups with experience in animal birth control were brought in under contract to boost the numbers.

However, the drive faced setbacks, most notably the COVID-19 pandemic, during which all sterilisation activities halted for months. During the 2020 lockdown period, dog-catching teams were off the streets, and clinics were closed.

This pause allowed stray dogs to breed unchecked, resulting in a noticeable jump in pup births by late 2020 and 2021. Officials acknowledge that the dog population increased significantly after the lockdown, erasing some of the prior gains. By the time ABC operations resumed in full swing in 2021-22, the field teams were essentially playing catch-up against a larger base population.

The current campaign’s impact is only now beginning to be measurable. By early 2024, NMC sources reported about 22,000 dogs sterilised in the span of eight to ten months, yet roughly 70,000 strays remained unoperated in the city.

In other words, less than one quarter of Nagpur’s strays had been covered by the program at that point. Officials stress that the effort is ongoing and will continue until a significant majority of the stray dogs are sterilised.

The municipal veterinary department has been identifying “high-risk” areas, localities with frequent dog bite complaints, and prioritising catches there. In practice, dog-catching vans move through these neighbourhoods, often predawn, to humanely capture strays for surgery.

Each dog is tagged and recorded, and after sterilisation and a brief post-operative holding (about three days for recovery), the animals are released back into their original territories.

This approach follows the standard protocol under India’s animal welfare laws of Catch, Neuter, Vaccinate, and Release (CNVR). The state government recently mandated strict enforcement of the latest ABC Rules (2023) in all urban areas of Maharashtra, including cities in Vidarbha, reinforcing that municipalities must rely on sterilisation and vaccination as the only acceptable methods of stray dog control.

City officials remain cautiously optimistic that the intensified sterilisation drive will eventually yield results. They point to success stories from other Indian cities, for example, Jaipur and Chennai, where sustained ABC programs reportedly stabilised and even reduced stray dog populations over time.

Nagpur’s campaign, now documenting nearly 40,000 surgeries, is among the most extensive in the Vidarbha region’s history of dog control efforts. “With additional kennel capacity, we can sterilise more dogs,” assures Dr. Gajendra Mahalle, the NMC’s veterinary officer leading the program, noting that expanded holding facilities allow for more post-surgery care and thus higher daily throughput.

The groundwork in Nagpur has been laid. Multiple teams, dedicated centres, and a growing database of sterilised animals. Yet, as the ongoing complaints and bite incidents show, sterilisation is not a quick fix, and several factors have limited its immediate effectiveness in curbing the overall dog population.

Why Population Control Remains Elusive

Despite the thousands of surgeries conducted, the stray dog population on Nagpur’s streets has not seen a dramatic decline. Experts and observers cite a variety of reasons for this gap between effort and outcome.

Reproduction can outpace sterilisation if the coverage isn’t high enough or fast enough.

Street dogs are prolific breeders. An unneutered female can produce two litters of pups a year, and those puppies can start reproducing in as little as 9–10 months.

Thus, even a small fraction of unsterilized females can perpetuate a cycle of rapid population growth.

Animal welfare groups estimate that spaying one female dog effectively prevents as many as 67,000 births over seven years. The flip side of that statistic is sobering: if that one female isn’t spayed, tens of thousands of new dogs could enter the population in a matter of years through her lineage.

In Nagpur, where tens of thousands of strays remained unsterilized until recently, enough breeding continued to keep the overall numbers high. It can take several consecutive years of high-volume sterilisations, covering well over 70% of the stray dogs, before the population growth rate drops and visible declines occur.

Nagpur is only now approaching the halfway mark in sterilising its strays, so the full benefits in terms of population reduction may not be immediate.

Implementation challenges and past lapses have also undercut the program’s effectiveness. The city’s ABC efforts date back to the early 2000s when India first embraced sterilization over culling, but for a long time Nagpur’s execution was half-hearted.

Oversight was weak. An official monitoring committee existed on paper but met infrequently and did not rigorously supervise the work, as admitted by one of its members. This meant there was little accountability for how the sterilisations were done or if targets were met. Quality control issues emerged as well.

Nagpur’s municipal corporation, for years, awarded sterilisation contracts through a tender process to local agencies, typically selecting the lowest bidder. According to the Animal Welfare Board of India’s guidelines, this practice often leads to corner-cutting and rule violations by contractors.

In Nagpur’s case, observers allege that some contractors in the past lacked adequately trained veterinarians or proper facilities, resulting in slower progress and occasional botched surgeries. Such flaws not only limited the number of dogs sterilised but also raised concerns about animal welfare, prompting criticism from animal rights activists. Only recently has the city brought in more reputed NGOs from outside Nagpur (including teams from Pune and even Hyderabad) to conduct the surgeries to higher standards.

Compounding these issues were resource constraints. Until the recent scale-up, Nagpur simply did not invest enough in the ABC program to make a dent in the dog population.

The NMC’s own data show that from 2016 to 2020, barely ₹66 lakh was spent on sterilisations in total, a relatively small sum for a city of Nagpur’s size. The capacity in terms of kennels, vehicles, and manpower was limited. As a result, the number of dogs sterilized annually was too low compared to the number of new puppies being born. Additionally, certain areas were underserved. Field teams often focused on easily reachable urban spots, while stray dogs in fringe areas or slum localities were left untouched, allowing those pockets to become breeding grounds.

This uneven coverage skewed the outcomes. Even now, animal welfare experts note that if even a few neighbourhoods are missed, the dogs there will reproduce and young animals will eventually disperse into other parts of the city, undermining the overall control effort.

Another major reason sterilisation alone hasn’t “solved” the problem yet is the nature of the ABC approach itself. It is humane but slow-acting. Under India’s laws, municipalities are prohibited from culling stray dogs.

The Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and directives of the Supreme Court bar any killing or relocation of strays as a means of population control. This means authorities cannot simply remove all dogs from the streets; they must instead neuter and return them, then wait for natural attrition to reduce the population over time.

In Nagpur, this legal framework has created a bind. Many residents express a desire for immediate removal of troublesome dog packs, but “citizens want us to permanently take away the dogs, which we cannot do,” explained an NMC official, noting that by law, captured dogs must be released back in the same area after sterilisation.

If officials attempt to relocate dogs elsewhere, animal activists quickly object and even resort to legal action. Community dog feeders and animal rights volunteers keep a close watch on the municipal dog vans to ensure dogs are not dumped in unfamiliar areas. This sometimes leads to friction. There have been incidents in Nagpur of angry locals attacking people who feed strays, as well as instances of animal activists allegedly threatening dog-catching teams.

The end result is that the NMC’s hands are tied to one method to sterilise and let the dogs live out their lives on the streets. While this approach does stabilize populations in the long run, it also means short-term nuisance issues persist, since the same animals (even if neutered) remain in the community.

The situation is further complicated by outdated local laws that conflict with modern animal welfare rules. For example, a provision in the Maharashtra Police Act technically empowers police to “destroy stray dogs” causing danger, but as Nagpur’s police officials recently informed the High Court, such colonial-era laws have been effectively overridden and rendered “toothless” by central animal protection laws.

The police acknowledge that they are largely helpless to directly eliminate or swiftly remove strays due to the legal prohibitions. This legal reality can be frustrating for residents expecting quick action, but public safety measures have to operate within the humane framework mandated across India.

One consequence is the “vacuum effect” often cited by experts. If authorities were to simply remove or cull dogs from one area, new unsterilized dogs from elsewhere would move in to fill the niche, and the cycle would continue.

Only by maintaining a high rate of sterilisation and vaccination in the existing stray population can a city gradually reduce the dog numbers while also keeping rabies in check.

Nagpur’s challenge, therefore, is to stay the course with ABC long enough to reach a tipping point.

Legal Hurdles and Ongoing Efforts

Faced with public pressure and tragic incidents, Nagpur’s authorities are exploring every avenue within the law to strengthen the stray dog control measures.

The Maharashtra state government has stepped in with new directives, pushing all municipal bodies, including those in Vidarbha, to fully implement the updated Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023.

These rules reiterate the mandate of Catch-Neuter-Vaccinate-Release and call for improved monitoring, quarterly dog population surveys, and increased public awareness.

Nagpur’s civic administration now submits periodic status reports to the High Court, detailing the number of dogs sterilised, vaccinated, and the infrastructure in place. The court, in turn, is closely monitoring compliance and has indicated it may issue more forceful orders if progress stalls. There is a consensus that any lapse or slowdown in the ABC program could quickly reverse gains, given how fast stray dogs can reproduce.

At the same time, novel ideas are being tried. In early 2024, responding to a court query, the district administration in Nagpur identified 47 plots of land on the city’s outskirts to potentially develop as stray dog shelters or rehabilitation centres.

The concept, inspired by a High Court suggestion, would be to fence off these open plots (each around five acres) and relocate some strays there, where they could be cared for, sterilised, and kept away from densely populated urban areas.

Such a plan, however, runs into legal and practical hurdles. Animal welfare rules prohibit dumping community dogs far from their original territory, and activists argue that mass relocation is just a cover for removal and could be inhumane if not managed properly.

The Nagpur authorities have clarified that any use of these land parcels would still have to conform to ABC Rules (for example, creating large enclosures where dogs are fed and monitored, rather than simply abandoning them).

The proposal reflects the pressure on the city to find relief for citizens beleaguered by aggressive strays, even as it navigates animal protection laws. Whether these stray dog parks materialise or not, the debate highlights the delicate balancing act between public safety and animal rights in Nagpur.

Importantly, voices on both sides of the issue seem to agree on one point that the long-term solution lies in systematic sterilisation and vaccination, not in short-term punitive measures.

“There are no shortcut solutions to control the stray menace,” as one animal welfare expert in Nagpur put it, emphasising that only sustained scientific efforts will yield results. The focus now is on plugging the gaps in the current program.

The NMC has been urged to improve its post-operative care and monitoring of sterilised dogs to ensure they recover well and do not suffer complications when released. Animal NGOs have stepped up to assist with feeding and caring for dogs during recovery, aiming to dispel public perception that the ABC process is cruel or negligent.

There are also calls for better public education to encourage residents not to resort to illegal harm against strays and to involve community volunteers in reporting unsterilized dogs for catching. Involving citizens is crucial in a city as large as Nagpur, where official teams cannot be everywhere; residents can help by alerting authorities to new litters of pups or aggressive animals in their locality so that timely action can be taken.

Nagpur’s struggle with its stray dog population is emblematic of a broader challenge faced by many Indian cities, but the scale in this Vidarbha metropolis makes it a test case for the effectiveness of the ABC approach.

So far, the city has made headway. Nearly half of its strays are now unable to reproduce, which should gradually lead to a decline in numbers if the momentum is maintained.

The coming years will be critical. If Nagpur manages to sterilise the majority of its street dogs and sustain that coverage, experts predict a noticeable drop in stray dog sightings and a corresponding fall in bite incidents.

The civic body has stated it will continue the intensive drives until “a significant reduction in the stray dog population is achieved”. For the citizens dodging packs of dogs on their morning walks, that reduction cannot come soon enough.

But it won’t happen overnight. In the meantime, Nagpur must persevere with its humane strategy, refine its methods by learning from past mistakes, and hold firm under public scrutiny. The city’s experience vividly illustrates why, despite its proven effectiveness, sterilisation alone has yet to tame the stray dog crisis, a reminder that patience, political will, and community cooperation are as vital as scalpel and suture in this public health endeavour.