Over 9,000 stray dogs in Chandigarh, 0 permanent shelter home
“There is no permanent dog pound facility set up in Chandigarh as of now for stray dogs,” Dr Gaurav Lakhanpal, nodal officer, Dog Control Cell, MC, said.
3 min read
From 2022 to February 2025, nearly 3,800 dogs have been sterilised under the MC’s initiative, which has been operational since 2015 to humanely control the stray dogs population.
With the Municipal Corporation (MC) estimating 9,000 stray dogs on the streets, Chandigarh currently has no permanent dog pound facility to house them.
“There is no permanent dog pound facility set up in Chandigarh as of now for stray dogs,” Dr Gaurav Lakhanpal, nodal officer, Dog Control Cell, MC, said.
The issue comes at a time when the Supreme Court has directed the Delhi government and civic bodies in Gurugram, Noida, and Ghaziabad to remove stray dogs from localities and house them in shelters, with instructions to not let canines return to the streets.
Chandigarh, however, is close to completing its long-running sterilisation programme, with only about 500 stray dogs left to be sterilised.
From 2022 to February 2025, nearly 3,800 dogs have been sterilised under the MC’s initiative, which has been operational since 2015 to humanely control the stray dogs population.
In 2024, the MC floated a tender for continuing the sterilisation work, but no NGO came forward to take up the contract. Lakhanpal explained that the small number of unsterilised dogs made the project commercially less viable for potential bidders.
Advocate Navkiran Singh, a dog lover and a human rights activist, said that no dog needs to stray. So people who love dogs should adopt, keep them vaccinated and under leash.
“There should not be any stray dogs moving in public. Dog pounds are the right place to give them home. Dog lovers can still go and feed them. If there is no dog pound in the city, then the administration must think of creating it in the forest area, where stray dogs and cattle can be kept,” Navkiran added.
Nikki Latta Gill, another animal welfare expert, said there is a dearth of permanent shelter options for dealing with the injured or abandoned animals.
“In Chandigarh, there is currently just one government-run shelter, SPCA, which has been mismanaged for years. As much as 96 per cent of the government grant is spent on salaries, 3 per cent on food and 0.6 per cent on meds. Dogs periodically starve, remain neglected and untreated, suffering silently. Animal Welfare Board of India’s report noted these lapses five years ago,” she said.
“When existing shelters continue to be absolute disasters with unchecked corruption and high mortality rates, based on what precedent or logic would new ones be created. Increase in dog population is a repeated failure of municipal corporations to humanely sterilise dogs due to systemic inefficiencies in birth control programs and rampant relocation.”
Gill also said that the organisation that was contracted to run the animal birth control programme in Chandigarh failed an official audit this year and the program was halted.
“Do dogs — free roaming animals, man’s best friend — deserve to be punished for failures on the part of humans? A nation is known by the way it treats its animals. A lifetime of suffering in imprisonment is not the ethical and humane way forward,” she said.
You May Like
