A municipality awards another contract.
Dogs are captured. Sterilisation procedures are counted. Shelters receive more animals. Euthanasia and body disposal services may follow.
The authority publishes the amount spent and the number of activities completed. Then the dog population continues to rise. At that point, taxpayers are entitled to ask a simple question: What did the money purchase?
It may have purchased thousands of individual procedures. It may have funded valuable veterinary care and protected many dogs. It may have supported responsible organisations working within an inadequate programme.
But if the authority cannot demonstrate a measurable effect on population growth, abandonment, rabies, bite incidence or animal welfare, the public may be purchasing activity rather than a solution.
Spending Is Not The Same As Progress
A contract can be completed exactly as written and still fail to solve the problem it was supposed to address.
A provider may have been contracted to sterilise 2,000 dogs and may have sterilised 2,000 dogs correctly. If the relevant population was 50,000, the programme was never operating at a scale capable of achieving its stated objective.
That is not necessarily the provider’s failure. The authority decided the scope, budget and target. It was responsible for understanding the population before purchasing the service.
Public procurement often measures what is easy to count: dogs captured, procedures completed, kennels built or animals removed.
Those are outputs. The outcomes are different: fewer unwanted litters, a declining free roaming population, reduced shelter intake, fewer rabies cases, fewer bites, higher vaccination coverage and better welfare.
Taxpayers should be shown both.
How Many Dogs Were There At The Beginning?
No authority can prove that a population management programme is working without a credible starting point.
It needs to know approximately how many dogs are present, where they are concentrated, how many are owned but allowed to roam and which parts of the population are producing unwanted puppies.
The same survey method must then be repeated at appropriate intervals.
Without a baseline, an authority may announce that 20,000 dogs have been sterilised without being able to say whether that represents 20%, 50% or 80% of the relevant population.
It cannot show whether numbers are falling. It cannot identify areas where births continue. It cannot determine whether dogs are moving in from neighbouring districts or being replaced through abandonment.
The World Organisation for Animal Health describes dog population management as a combination of measures intended to achieve sustainable improvements in dog health and welfare, public health, public safety and the environment while considering economic costs and benefits.
That requires measurement not assumption.
Kolkata Shows What Happens When Coverage Is Too Low
Kolkata Municipal Corporation began a time limited programme in March 2022 intended to sterilise 60% of the city’s estimated 84,000 stray dogs.
More than three years later, reporting indicated that only around 10% had been covered.
The project had received ₹86 lakh in state funding, but inadequate infrastructure, staffing shortages and inconsistent local data reportedly restricted progress. Available facilities could accommodate only a small number of dogs at a time, and one pound was affected by flooding.
The problem was not that too few procedures had been purchased. The programme lacked the infrastructure and capacity necessary to deliver them at the required scale.
The veterinary teams performing the work cannot be blamed for an authority commissioning a target that the surrounding system cannot support.
If the programme was intended to reach 60% but reached only 10%, taxpayers need to know why the gap was allowed to persist, what was learned and what will change before further money is committed.
Mumbai Is Spending More But It Must Define Success
Mumbai has approved ₹23 crore in three year contracts with nine NGOs for sterilisation under its Animal Birth Control programme.
The city’s 2024 survey estimated 90,757 stray dogs, including 33,671 that had not been sterilised. The current target is to sterilise and vaccinate at least 22,251 dogs annually.
Mumbai has carried out large numbers of procedures over many years. BMC figures cited in 2026 stated that 4.34 lakh sterilisation surgeries had been performed between 1994 and August 2025.
During the debate over the new contracts, a corporator reportedly stated that approximately ₹70 crore had been spent since the 1990s and called for the strategy to be reassessed because dog bite concerns remained.
A long running programme should be able to show more than a cumulative surgery total. It should demonstrate how the street-dog population has changed, whether vaccination coverage is being maintained, whether puppy numbers are falling and whether the geographical areas driving population growth are receiving sufficient attention.
The NGOs contracted to perform surgery should be judged on the work they were commissioned and funded to deliver. The responsibility for designing a coherent citywide strategy remains with BMC.
Rising Numbers Do Not Automatically Prove Sterilisation Failed
If dog numbers rise during a sterilisation programme, it does not necessarily mean that sterilisation is ineffective.
The programme may not have reached enough dogs. It may have focused on the wrong locations. New dogs may have entered from neighbouring areas. Owned dogs may have been abandoned. Unregulated breeding and sale may have continued. Food waste may have sustained a larger roaming population.
The population estimate itself may also have changed because a later survey used a different method or counted more accurately.
Those possibilities are precisely why proper evaluation is required.
Authorities should not claim success from procedure totals, but neither should they abandon humane prevention without examining why the programme failed to achieve sufficient coverage.
The correct response to poor results is evidence-led correction not a rapid return to mass removal or killing.
What Is The Contract Designed To Achieve?
Before awarding a dog-management contract, an authority should state the outcome it expects.
If it funds sterilisation, what proportion of the relevant reproductive population must be reached, and by when?
If it funds vaccination, what coverage is required to protect public health?
If it funds capture, what is supposed to happen to the dogs afterwards?
If it funds a shelter, is success measured by occupancy or by reclaim, rehabilitation and adoption?
If it funds enforcement, should abandonment and unlicensed breeding decline?
The contract should identify the measures for judging progress and the data that will be published.
Otherwise, success becomes whatever the authority has already paid for.
A capture contractor succeeds by capturing. A shelter succeeds by holding. A veterinary provider succeeds by completing procedures. Each may fulfil its contract while the overall system continues to fail.
Someone must remain responsible for the complete outcome. That is the public authority.
Repeating The Same Response Creates A Permanent Market
When dog numbers remain high, authorities can commission the same services repeatedly. Another capture contract is issued. More shelter space is purchased. Another sterilisation drive is announced. More money is allocated to killing or disposal.
The continuing crisis creates continuing demand.
This does not mean that every contractor, shelter or veterinary provider wants the problem to persist. Many are working towards a future in which fewer dogs need their services. But an economy built around managing the consequences can continue indefinitely if nobody is funded and held responsible for eliminating the causes.
The system must therefore reward measurable reduction in abandonment, uncontrolled reproduction and shelter intake not merely the repeated processing of dogs already produced by those failures.
Taxpayers May Be Buying An Underfunded Programme
Poor outcomes do not always mean too much money was spent. They may mean that too little was committed to the measures capable of working.
A government may fund occasional sterilisation drives while failing to provide sufficient veterinary capacity, transport or recovery space. It may refuse to subsidise sterilisation for owned dogs while paying repeatedly to capture their abandoned offspring.
It may fund shelters without enforcing identification, breeding or abandonment laws. It may count vaccinated dogs without maintaining the coverage needed over time.
In those circumstances, taxpayers are purchasing fragments of a strategy. Each fragment may be worthwhile, but the pieces do not combine into sustained population management.
A cheap programme that cannot reach effective coverage is not a saving. It is a recurring expense.
Public Reporting Must Connect Spending To Results
Authorities should publish the total cost of each programme together with the outcome it was intended to achieve.
The records should include population estimates, methodology, geographical coverage, sterilisation and vaccination figures, surgical mortality, shelter intake, births observed, abandonment complaints, bites, rabies cases and live and non live shelter outcomes.
Costs should be presented alongside changes in those indicators.
The public should be able to see whether spending increased while the population fell, remained unchanged or continued to rise.
Where results fall short, the authority should explain whether the cause was insufficient funding, low coverage, poor data, contractual failure, population movement, abandonment or another factor.
Renewing a contract without evaluating its impact simply purchases another period of activity.
What Did The Money Change?
The purpose of public spending is not to create impressive totals. It is to produce safer communities, healthier dogs, fewer unwanted litters and less suffering.
Providers should be properly paid for the work they perform. Responsible shelters, NGOs, veterinarians and contractors cannot be expected to repair years of policy failure without adequate resources.
But governments must stop treating the number of paid transactions as proof that the underlying crisis is being solved. If dog numbers keep rising, taxpayers may be purchasing capture without prevention, sterilisation without sufficient coverage, sheltering without outcomes and repeated intervention without strategy.
Before the next contract is awarded, the authority should be required to answer: What did the previous spending change and what will taxpayers be purchasing this time that is capable of producing a different result?