Stepping out of home unescorted proved to be a costly misadventure for 18-month-old Pulluri Vihaan at Adarsh Nagar Colony of Jawahar Nagar, located about 25 kilometres from the zero mile of Hyderabad city. The toddler’s mother, Venkata Lakshmi, saw him last around 6.30 p.m. of July 16 this year, while going out with her husband to buy medicines for her ailing daughter. The family, originally from Siddipet district, had been staying at Lakshmi’s brother’s house in Hyderabad.
“Vihaan came running to the gate, offering a piece of banana to me. I petted him and left along with my husband, with the image of my cheerful son imprinted on my mind,” recalls Lakshmi, a homemaker.
Just hours later, she saw her son’s body at the mortuary of Gandhi Hospital in Hyderabad — disfigured, swollen and full of deep gash wounds.
As soon as Vihaan had stepped out of the gate escaping his grandmother’s watch, he was dragged away by a pack of stray dogs that attacked him viciously for 20 minutes before anybody noticed.
Two private hospitals refused admission seeing the boy’s condition. He was finally shifted to Gandhi Hospital, 16 kilometres away. Vihaan died on the way.
“On our way back from the medical store, my wife and I saw a crowd gathered at the place, but we did not think much of it. When we did not find Vihaan at home, a sense of dread washed over us. We ran to the place, only to learn that he had been rushed to hospital,” shares Vihaan’s father, Bharat Kumar Pulluri, a carpenter.
Vihaan was the only son among the couple’s three children, and was born 11 years after the second girl. “Going against doctors’ advice, I chose to have another child, hoping my two girls would have a brother to take care of them. Now, I cannot have another child, because of uterus fibroids,” she says. “That day, he fed me a banana, and I fed him to the dogs,” she adds before breaking down into hysterical sobs.
Two days after the incident, the site of the attack bore a grim look. The once-overgrown government land, spanning about 25-30 acres, close the site now stands cleared of trash and vegetation. Freshly installed streetlights line the row of houses, overlooking the empty ground. At one end of the ground lies a forested area belonging to the Central Reserve Police Force premises.
On the northern edge of this vacant land is an unoccupied double-bedroom Dignity Housing Colony of the Telangana government.
Municipal apathy
The grief-stricken home is merely 50 yards from the location of the attack. Stray dogs still prowl nearby, their barks punctuating the sorrowful wails of the bereaved family members.
Local residents blame the incident on the apathy of municipal authorities, whose lack of action, they allege, has turned the government land into a haven for dogs and drug addicts.
“Under the cover of darkness, meat sellers and restaurateurs dump waste here every night. Stray dogs feed on that and thrive. Attacks on people returning home at night are a routine occurrence,” says K. Satyanarayanachari, a resident.
Door-to-door garbage collection, segregation and disposal as enunciated in the Solid Waste Management Rules, 2016, is still a distant dream for Telangana, which bagged over 20 awards in Swachh Survekshan 2024. The Jawahar Nagar Municipal Corporation, constituted in 2019 and adjoining the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation, is now part of the Telangana Core Urban Region, encompassing all areas within the 158-kilometre Outer Ring Road.
Jawahar Nagar houses the sole solid waste treatment facility catering to the requirements of GHMC. It also hosts a large migrant population living in its 95-100 slums.
Mounds of garbage line both sides of the main road leading to Adarsh Nagar area, with packs of dogs rummaging through the waste for food. Pungent odour from the legacy landfill on the horizon, combined with the stench of fresh garbage, assault the senses.
“Private garbage collectors charge ₹100-150 per month, which people here cannot afford to pay. They deposit the trash in dumper bins installed at select locations by the municipality or in the open for the dogs to forage,” says K. Kishore, president of Adarsh Nagar Welfare Association.
Vihaan is the 15th fatality due to canine attacks in Telangana this year alone. About 75% of the victims are children.
Less than three weeks before Vihaan’s death, seven-year-old Vishal, son of migrant labourers from Bihar, was mauled to death by stray dogs in Isnapur of Patancheru mandal, Sangareddy district, just four kilometres outside the Outer Ring Road. On the same day, three kilometres away in Muthangi village, a seven-month-old was also attacked by dogs but was fortunately rescued and taken to hospital. In April, Deepali, another toddler, had been mauled to death in Jeedimetla area.
The socio-economic profile of the majority of victims is strikingly similar — they are predominantly poor and mostly migrants.
Bharat Kumar and his family migrated from Mirudoddi village in Siddipet district in search of livelihood. He found himself jobless after the Telangana Forest Department seized the sawing machine he had inherited from his ancestors for carpentry work, following government orders sanctioning confiscation of timber-cutting machines from villages within a five-kilometre radius of the forest boundary.
“For the past two months, I was struggling to find a job. Recently, I found one with a broadband internet service-providing company, and rented a house too. We were planning the housewarming the next day, and would have shifted there had this not happened,” Bharat Kumar says.
Controlling canine population
The news of Vihaan’s death sparked outrage across the city. Residents held a demonstration at the attack site, seeking solution to the stray dogs issue. Chief Minister A.Revanth Reddy was forced to take note, and issue instructions to prevent recurrence of such incidents. GHMC dog-catching squads descended on the area, capturing over 100 dogs and relocating them to animal care centres managed by Blue Cross, an NGO.
In adherence to the Animal Birth Control rules of the Animal Welfare Board of India, GHMC has been carrying out the ABC-ARV (Animal Birth Control-Anti Rabies Vaccination) programme for street dogs to control their population within its jurisdiction.
As part of the programme, the animals should be sterilised, given anti-rabies vaccination and after recovery, released in the same area they were captured from. Their ears are clipped after sterilisation for easy identification.
In the vicinity of Adarsh Nagar, a large number of dogs are still roaming the streets even after dozens were shifted to the centres. Most of them had the ear notches. Kishore alleges that dogs with ear notches do not belong to Jawahar Nagar but are transported in vans and released there by the GHMC. For their part, GHMC authorities deny this claim, stating that dogs frequently cross boundaries, making it challenging to identify their original territory. Interestingly, the same officials attribute the high canine population within GHMC’s jurisdiction to dogs moving in from outside areas.
Currently, government-operated animal care centres for ABC-ARV operations are functional at only five locations within GHMC area. Outside GHMC, 21 urban local bodies entered an MoU with Blue Cross in 2023 for carrying out ABC-ARV programme.
“A large number of these municipalities do not pay us on time. Dues of up to two years are pending, yet we somehow manage to carry on with donations,” says N.S.K.Kumari, shelter director of Blue Cross.
The ABC-ARV programme was stalled in Jawahar Nagar corporation since the beginning of the financial year as its council had refused to clear last year’s bills. Following Vihaan’s death, the MoU with the voluntary organisation was hurriedly revived.
No survey has been conducted to estimate the dog population in Telangana yet, except in GHMC limits. As per the figures submitted by GHMC to the Telangana High Court recently, there are approximately 3.8 lakh stray dogs in its purview. This is far less than the number cited by Mayor G. Vijayalakshmi in 2023, which was 5.75 lakh.
Since 2014-15, over 7.21 lakh dogs have been sterilised, says the corporation. Institute of Preventive Medicine reports that close to 3.37 lakh persons have approached for anti-rabies shot following an animal bite, since 2014. During the same period, eight children were mauled to death by dogs in GHMC periphery.
“Dogs always seem to attack children from poor families, whereas kids of the so-called animal lovers are safe in their homes. When a dog dies, they all cry hoarse, but what about my child? Why are they silent now,” asks Bharat Kumar.
When four-year-old K. Pradeep died after being attacked by a pack of dogs in Amberpet area of GHMC last February, film director Ram Gopal Varma was the first celebrity to question the government’s canine control policy. Enraged by the Mayor Vijayalakshmi’s comments that stray dogs tend to attack children due to hunger, and thus, should be fed and adopted as a preventive measure, Varma asked if this love for animals extended beyond dogs to other pests like rats and mosquitoes. He also criticised animal welfare activism as an elitist movement that is indifferent to the plight of the poor and marginalised who usually bear the brunt.
Human-dog conflict: call for culling
The demand for euthanising stray dogs is growing shriller with each new attack. Post Vihaan’s death, Forum for Better Hyderabad, a civil society organisation, invoked provisions of the GHMC Act to argue that strays can be culled. In a letter to the Principal Secretary of Municipal Administration & Urban Development, the forum’s president, M. Padmanabha Reddy, questioned why dogs may not be killed when culling orders are issued for wild animals like boars and elephants when they become unmanageable.
Resentment among people sometimes spirals out of control, and results in incidents of mass killing of dogs. Over 20 dogs were shot to death by unidentified men in February this year, at Ponnakal village of Mahabubnagar in Telangana. Last year in April, death of over 100 street dogs allegedly through poisoning was reported from Shamirpet region of Medchal Malkajgiri district.
There has been growing disapproval over roadside feeding of dogs too. The revised ABC rules issued by the Animal Welfare Board of India (AWBI) last year encourage feeding of strays, and made Resident Welfare Associations/ Apartment Owner Association/ Local Body representative of the area responsible for designating feeding spots and timings for community dogs.
Abi Tamim Vanak, director of the Centre for Policy Design at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology & Environment, argues that random feeding of stray dogs without any responsibility leads to the formation of packs, which then attack the vulnerable.
“If you feed them at one place, they tend to congregate and form large packs. This is all because some people can feel good about feeding dogs. These people are turning dogs into enemies,” Vanak says.
He says the ABC-ARV programme, in place since 2001, is not the solution, as proven by the increasing number of attacks. “AWBI has strict rules for pet dogs which are enjoined to be put on leash. Then why are stray dogs let free? Instead of spending crores on court cases, why can’t these animal welfare organisations use the money to build shelters for strays,” he asks.
Amala Akkineni, founder of Blue Cross, defends the ABC-ARV programme, and blames the proliferation of street dogs on indiscriminate handling of waste. She believes that if the programme is properly implemented by accountable groups, with community support and monitoring, issues surrounding garbage and street animals can be effectively managed.
“Currently, we are handling 25 projects across the city and surrounding municipalities. Not a single human death has taken place in any of these areas. Our surveys reveal that most of the dog bite cases are taking place in localities where dogs have been removed or relocated,” she says, terming it as grave danger, as the empty space around garbage is taken over by new dogs that are hostile and unfriendly.
She believes that those who fear dogs and those who feed them should engage in civil discussions to address concerns on both sides and find common ground.
Srinivasulu Chelmala, a Zoology professor at Hyderabad’s Osmania University with a special interest in wildlife biology, offers a unique perspective into the aggression among stray dogs, and attributes it to absence of early imprinting of the human as the leader of the pack. “Dogs evolved from wolves. Their domestication happened around the time humans shifted to agriculture-based lifestyle, which is very recent in anthropological perspective. When wild instincts kick in, dogs are equal to wild animals,” Chelmala says.
If puppies are exposed to human petting and control, they will not exhibit such aggressive behaviour, he says. Even if one dog without this early imprint initiates an attack, the others form a pseudo-pack and join in.
Chelmala also advocates against roadside feeding, stating that the availability of ample resources and lack of competition encourage dogs to breed. “We should have scientific compassion, not misplaced compassion,” he explains.
Following the Jawahar Nagar incident, the Telangana High Court took suo motu cognisance of the spate of stray dog attacks and set a deadline for the government to draw up an action plan. Accordingly, the State government has announced constitution of an apex committee comprising senior officials and members of Blue Cross to formulate an action plan to control dog-bite incidents.
Measures include implementing the ABC-ARV programme in all districts, intensifying public awareness campaigns, and mandating the availability of crèches at construction sites to protect children when their parents are away.
