Bhubaneswar: With Orissa High Court lifting the stay on dog sterilisation January 9, Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation (BMC) has said that steps would be taken to make Bhubaneswar rabies-free by 2025.
A BMC official said that all stray dogs will be sterilised within a year and a half to reduce the menace of stray dogs in the state capital.
However, BMC’s rabies-free target seems to be a long shot as the civic body does not have an accurate estimate of the number of stray dogs roaming in the city, a source said Thursday.
The number of dogs in BMC area is being estimated, the source added.
BMC’s long-standing project to count stray dogs to ascertain their actual numbers has not been implemented as yet.
According to the project, a firm needs to be appointed following a tender-call notice that would visit each ward in Bhubaneswar and prepare a stray-dog census. The Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme would be planned based on the data provided by the surveying agency.
However, for over a year now, the project has been stuck under BMC’s red tape.
BMC Deputy Commissioner Ramesh Chandra Jena said the tender for the project will be floated soon. A dog hospital being built in Mancheswar area will be inaugurated in a week’s time, he informed.
Why stay was imposed on ABC?
The dog sterilisation drive in the state had been on hold in the state from July last year following a public interest litigation (PIL) in Orissa High Court alleging violation of ABC programme norms in Bhubaneswar. The PIL was filed in the court alleging that the Odisha government had been undertaking dog sterilisation without a monitoring committee.
The Supreme Court had issued a directive to all the states to constitute a state-level monitoring committee for the ABC programme.
Notably, the ABC programme requires catching, vaccinating, neutering, and releasing stray dogs. The Fisheries and Animal Resources Development Department of the state government runs the ABC programme in 12 urban areas such as Bhubaneswar, Cuttack, Puri, Sambalpur, Angul, Jagatsinghpur, Baripada, Berhampur, Balasore, Bhawanipatna, Rourkela and Jajpur.
Why does Odisha need ABC?
While answering a query in Lok Sabha last year on dog bite menace, Minister of State of Health and Family Welfare Satyapal Singh Baghel informed that Odisha saw 64,642 dog bite cases in the year 2022 while it was 59,085 in 2021. Odisha had ranked among the top 10 states with most dog bite cases.
According to 2019 Livestock Census, Odisha has second-highest number of stray dogs (around 17 lakh) after Uttar Pradesh in India.
PNN
