Half of Gujarat is missing from the state’s latest account of how it is controlling stray dogs. At a High Court hearing on October 28, the government produced six months of sterilisation and vaccination figures for 17 of its 34 districts, Gujarat Samachar reported. Gujarat First and GSTV carried the same count. The state asked for more time to file the remainder, and the court will take up the matter again next week.
The case is a suo motu PIL. LiveLaw reported in August that the Supreme Court told High Courts to register such cases and monitor whether states clear strays from schools, hospitals, bus stands and railway stations. The figures Gujarat files feed that monitoring.
The missing 17 and the Vadodara explanation
The government told the bench that some districts have no Animal Birth Control (ABC) centre, which makes district-wise figures hard to compile. It said larger centres take dogs from neighbouring districts. Gujarat Samachar named Vadodara as the state’s example and said nearby districts therefore showed zero. DeshGujarat reported the same argument from the government pleader.
TV9 Gujarati reported that the judges called the figures incomplete. Gujarat Samachar reported that they asked whether the state meant to put zeroes before the Supreme Court while claiming statewide work.
The state’s own earlier evidence makes the gap harder to explain. In August it told the court that centres geo-tag and barcode each dog before release. A record like that should show where a dog came from, even if the surgery took place two districts away, and the home district is the number the court wants.
Two hundred surgeries a day across 23 centres
The August hearing gives the fullest statewide picture we could find. The government pleader listed 23 ABC centres in 16 districts, with 29 more proposed, according to LiveLaw and Supreme Today. Those centres had 81 veterinary professionals and 181 paramedics. They sterilised 36,132 dogs in 180 days and vaccinated 44,483.
By our arithmetic, that works out to about 200 sterilisations a day statewide, or under nine per centre. Nobody can say how far that goes, because the count of dogs still awaiting the procedure was not available at that hearing.
The bench suggested in August, orally, that the state work territory by territory in phases, starting with a pilot in Ahmedabad, and return sterilised dogs to the area they came from. That approach needs numbers at the level of a district or smaller. A state that cannot yet report for half its districts has not reached that stage.
79,150 inspections and a question about the vaccine
The state’s other headline figure this week was 79,150 offices and institutions inspected, covering schools, anganwadis, hospitals, bus depots and gram panchayat offices. Gujarat Samachar, Gujarat First and DeshGujarat all reported the figure as the government’s claim.
The judges also want details of the vaccines used on the dogs, including who makes them and what side effects they may cause, according to Gujarat Samachar and GSTV.
The reports we checked do not name the 17 districts left out. Until the state files the rest, a resident of one of those districts has no public figure showing whether anyone sterilised a single dog there in the past six months.
Sources: Gujarat Samachar, Gujarat First, GSTV, DeshGujarat, TV9 Gujarati, LiveLaw, Supreme Today
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.