August 26, 2025
NEW DELHI – The Supreme Court has now redrawn the battle lines in the country’s long and troubled relationship with its street dogs. After weeks of controversy over an earlier directive to confine every stray in the national capital region (NCR) within newly built shelters, the court has shifted course, opting instead for a calibrated balance between public safety and animal welfare. The new order allows healthy, non-aggressive dogs to be sterilised, vaccinated, and returned to their capture sites ~ a return to the globally recognised model of population control that India had already legislated.
At the same time, it insists that rabid or aggressive animals be confined in shelters, and it bans the feeding of strays in public places, requiring municipal bodies to designate proper feeding zones. Adoption has been permitted through civic authorities, but adopted dogs must not be sent back to the streets. This is a significant correction. The earlier blanket directive to round up and cage nearly a million dogs in Delhi alone, within two months, was logistically impossible and morally fraught. It provoked a storm of opposition because such mass confinement risked producing overcrowded shelters, disease outbreaks, and eventual culling. The revised position signals that the judiciary has recognised the limits of state capacity and the dangers of overreach.
Yet the judgment also raises a fresh set of challenges. Enforcing feeding bans in crowded cities is easier written than done. Ensuring that designated feeding areas are created, maintained, and used responsibly will require coordination between civic authorities, resident groups, and animal welfare volunteers. Adoption too, while a humane pathway, will call for rigorous monitoring to prevent abandonment or abuse. And the classification of “aggressive” dogs could quickly become subjective, opening the door to misuse. At its core, the court has placed the burden squarely back on municipal governance. India’s urban local bodies have long struggled ~ and often failed ~ to implement sterilisation and vaccination programmes at the scale required.
Funds are routinely underutilised or siphoned off, while waste management, a key driver of stray proliferation, remains woefully inadequate. Why, even getting a dog license for a pet is a challenge in Delhi. Without fixing these basics, even the best-framed judicial orders risk sinking into the familiar cycle of half-measures and neglect. The promise of a national policy on strays, as hinted at by the court, is perhaps the most consequential part of this ruling. Fragmented state-level responses have created inconsistency and confusion, with each crisis spawning litigation instead of coordinated solutions.
A central framework could finally bring uniform standards for sterilisation, vaccination, shelter design, and accountability mechanisms. India stands today not at the end of a dispute, but at a pivot. The court has avoided an unworkable extremity and steered the issue back toward a humane middle path. The task now is for governments ~ national and local alike ~ to treat this reprieve not as closure, but as a call to act decisively where they have long faltered.