Stray dog control: Why Lucknow has been hailed in Supreme Court hearings

The ‘Lucknow Model’ is the result of a public-private partnership between the Lucknow Municipal Corporation and Humane World for Animals India, the Indian affiliate of a global nonprofit. Since 2019, as per corporation figures, this collaboration has sterilised and vaccinated nearly one lakh dogs, achieving a coverage of over 84% – significantly higher than the 70% threshold recommended by the World Health Organization for effective population control.

According to Dr Abhinav Verma, Animal Welfare Officer at the Lucknow corporation, the city has an estimated street dog population of 1.35 lakh. Sterilisation of a lakh is thus a significant figure, Verma says, terming Lucknow a “pioneer” in Animal Birth Control (ABC) implementation.

Verma also commended Humane World for Animals India for its “good, scientific methods of ABC work”. “They do detailed planning, so implementation is smooth.”

Come February, Lucknow will take another step towards controlling strays, and inaugurate India’s first comprehensive ABC training centre.

Two-plank strategy

According to those on the ground, the success lies in moving beyond the traditional, often haphazard, approach to ABC. “Our work is based on two planks: ABC work and community engagement. Both are important,” says Ratesh Rao, Senior Manager at Humane World for Animals India, who leads the organisation’s work in the city.

So unlike most cities which focus on the sterilisation of stray dogs, Lucknow places equal weight on changing human behaviour. Under an initiative titled ‘Abhay Sankalp’, officials engage with Resident Welfare Associations, schools and slum clusters to bring about this change.

“We hold training and awareness sessions on how to engage with dogs, understand their body language, when and when not to approach them, as well as what and how to feed them,” Rao says.

This engagement also addresses a critical bottleneck: relocation. Under the ABC Rules, 2023, stray dogs cannot be relocated from their territory; relocation creates a vacuum that is quickly filled by other dogs, often more aggressive, leading to territorial fights and increased biting incidents.

Through workshops, as well as a dedicated helpline, the team has sought to explain to residents how relocation is not just illegal but also counter-productive. Consequently, Rao says, demands for displacing dogs have dropped, replaced by requests for sterilisation.

Dog bite numbers

While the sterilisation numbers are robust, measuring the impact on dog bites remains complex due to disparate data sets.

Data from the Lucknow Chief Medical Officer’s (CMO’s) office shows a steep rise in anti-rabies vaccinations at government facilities – from 37,748 in 2016-17 to 1,74,140 in 2023-24. However, officials caution against reading this as a direct count of stray dog attacks. Vivek Jaiswal, the district data manager, notes that while hospitals are directed to count a patient as a single case, irrespective of the number of doses, “we cannot discount the possibility of human error or hospitals forwarding us their total vaccinations”.

This data also includes bites from all animals, including monkeys, cats, mongoose and pet dogs, and covers patients coming to Lucknow from neighbouring districts, Verma says. “There is no relation between sterilisation and dog bites. Sterilisation is a population-control long-term project.”

Significantly, the CMO data also records zero human deaths due to rabies in the last 10 years.

Incidentally, a dataset maintained by Humane World for Animals India, based on helpline complaints regarding aggressive stray dogs and dog bites, suggests a decline. Complaints of “serious biting” or “attempts to bite” rose to a peak of 2,977 in 2023, before dropping to 1,527 in 2024. In 2025, the figure went down further to 999.

Dr Piyush Patel, the director of the organisation’s street dog programme, attributes this dip to the city achieving 75% sterilisation rate in 2023 – which leads to population stabilisation. He also admitted the possibility of multiple complaints regarding a single dog.

Supriya Shrivastava, 53, who has lived in Lucknow for 29 years and has volunteered with the programme to control the dog population since 2020, describes the initiative as a “boon”. “People have become more relaxed around stray dogs because they have seen their population reducing,” she says. “They also trust now that dogs won’t bite or attack them without provocation.”