India’s Supreme Court has delivered one of the most consequential judgments on the management of free roaming dogs in the country’s history. The ruling directs authorities to remove dogs from schools, hospitals, railway stations, bus stations and other institutional areas, while requiring every district to establish Animal Birth Control (ABC) centres and strengthen sterilisation and vaccination programmes.
For many, the judgment represents a new legal framework for managing India’s street dog population.
For us, it raises a far more urgent question. What will happen to the dogs once they are removed?
That question is important because laws do not protect animals on their own. Policies do not feed hungry dogs, provide veterinary treatment or guarantee humane care. Everything depends on implementation, and across India the implementation of stray dog management has too often been marked by inconsistency, limited resources and growing pressure on local authorities.
The Supreme Court has made it clear that dogs removed from institutional areas are not to be returned to those locations after sterilisation. Instead, they are to enter the system created under the Animal Birth Control programme. On paper, that sounds orderly. In reality, many municipalities are already struggling to provide the infrastructure needed to manage the dogs already in their care.
In Nagpur, officials recently acknowledged that almost 1,900 dogs remain in institutional areas because there is simply nowhere to relocate them. The city’s existing ABC shelters have capacity for only a fraction of the dogs requiring accommodation, highlighting the gap between legal expectations and operational reality.
Mumbai has announced plans to build three new shelters as authorities respond to an estimated population of around 94,000 free roaming dogs, an indication of the enormous scale of the challenge facing even India’s largest cities.
In Ernakulam, concerns have been raised that several ABC centres are either non functional or operating without enough veterinarians, trained dog catchers or resources to deliver an effective programme.
These are not isolated administrative problems. They expose the reality that infrastructure has struggled to keep pace with expectations for years.
That is why we believe this judgment should be viewed with caution. The legal wording may appear balanced, but the experience of dogs will depend entirely on what happens after capture. If shelters are already full, if ABC centres are under resourced, if veterinary capacity is insufficient and if oversight is weak, then expanding removals risks placing even greater pressure on a system that is already showing signs of strain.
Supporters of the judgment argue that it strikes a balance between protecting public safety and maintaining humane population management through sterilisation and vaccination. Those objectives are not incompatible. Every community deserves to be safe, and every dog deserves humane treatment.
The difficulty is that humane treatment cannot simply be written into a judgment. It has to exist in practice.
That means properly funded facilities, qualified veterinary teams, transparent record keeping, independent monitoring and enough capacity to care for every dog that enters the system. Without those safeguards, the welfare of removed dogs becomes increasingly difficult to verify.
India’s stray dog crisis has never been simply a legal issue. It is a question of resources, accountability and political will.
The Supreme Court has now set a new legal direction, but history suggests that implementation is where good intentions are most likely to falter. If governments are serious about protecting both people and animals, they must be prepared to demonstrate not only how dogs are removed, but where they go, how they are cared for and what ultimately becomes of them.
For millions of India’s street dogs, that is the question that now matters more than any judgment.
This is awful, where will the dogs go poor things.