Letter from Bangalore: When every stray dog will have his day

The next time Indian expatriates from the Gulf return or visit India's technology capital and hold a party, don't feel offended if friends prefer to leave early.

They may have several personal reasons to leave, but one of them could also be because they are scared of driving their two-wheelers through the streets of Bangalore.

Not that they are scared of mugging. But because they are scared of getting bitten by the rabies-infected stray dogs whose population is growing at a pace unseen anytime in previous decades.

And, one of the major reasons for their explosive growth in numbers was put across recently by a health official of the Bangalore city corporation.

"No Sir, we cannot do anything. Somebody will complain to Delhi and we will get a bad name if we eliminate the rabies-infected dogs. It is, perhaps, easier to get rid of human beings, not stray dogs these days."

All that the official offered to do was to get the dogs picked up and spayed or sterilised and released again in the same street.

The message was simple. The citizen has to just learn to live with the non-stop barking through the night or get bitten to pay around Rs2,600 for anti-rabies injections that, in any case, are in short supply in government hospitals.

The lower rung official was not wrong. His commissioner M.R. Sreenivasa Murthy, a civil servant with an impeccable record, has expressed his inability to deal with the problem because of "threats" from Delhi (the ministries of urban development, social justice, environment and forests).

But, Murthy's inability brought a strong reprimand, earlier this week, from none other than Karnataka's Ombudsman or the Lok Ayuktha, Justice N. Venkatachala, whose drive against corruption in the last year or so has made him one of the most popular personalities in the state.

Justice Venkatachala, a former judge of the Supreme Court, lashed out at animal rights activists for putting animal rights over human rights. "India is the only country in the world where there are 'animal activists' to advocate the existence of stray dogs on the streets at the risk of human lives."

Over 50,000 people die every year in India due to rabies, invariably, contracted from stray dogs. Except for the Andaman and Nicobar and Lakshwadeep islands, every Indian city faces the problem of stray dogs and rabies.

Justice Venkatachala, in his verdict, quoted the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) commending the Municipal Act of Pune, which provided for destruction or elimination of stray dogs, to drive home his point.

"Human life should not be endangered in such a way that the majority of the city's population be traumatised to make a select few happy," the NHRC had said.

"If no action is taken now, the future generation should know who are the people responsible for the high incidence of rabies in India, whose only beneficiaries are animal activists and multi-national rabies vaccine manufacturers," Justice Venka-tachala said.

He said what top scientists fell short of saying two months ago at the 90th session of the Indian Science Congress. Two of India's top scientists had also lashed out at animal rights activists for thwarting medical research in the country.

Their point was that animal activists were preventing import of Beagle dogs for testing a DNA vaccine for the welfare of animals, too. The vaccine has been developed by the city-based Indian Institute of Science, Asia's premier scientific institution.

But, will the current campaign prevent the spread of rabies? Human beings may not be that lucky, it seems. Every stray dog would have his day.