Failing at ABC

Why in the News

An investigation across Tamil Nadu and Puducherry into the outsourced Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme, under which local bodies contract organisations to sterilise and vaccinate community dogs, records starved animals, botched mass surgeries, broken vaccine cold chains and fabricated organ counts.

What do the Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023 require?

1. Humane capture and return to the same place: Capture with nets, feeder outreach before capture, and geotagging of both capture and release at the same location.
2. Surgical and shelter standards: Closed circuit cameras in the operation theatre, pre-operative and post-operative care, clean and spacious kennels, food twice a day and water at all times.
3. Verification tied to billing: Organ inspection committees are to be constituted to count organs against billing claims.
4. Disposal after the count: Organs are to be destroyed immediately by deep burial or incineration.

What did the investigation find at the centres?

1. Oulgaret, Puducherry: An internal municipal dossier recorded 50 emaciated dogs released from an ABC centre in late 2025, 20 dog deaths and 50 complaints against the veterinarian. The animals were released hastily just before an inspection, with sutures falling apart.
2. Velankanni, Nagapattinam district: On 23 July dogs were found alive with loose sutures and no post-operative care, and carcasses were found in garbage with bloody sutures and with wires and ropes around their necks, both banned in the catching process. The District Animal Welfare Officer’s report recorded 70 dogs, 64 males and six females, sterilised in three days by two veterinarians.
3. Mannargudi, Tiruvarur district: On 2 September a female dog was found alive with its intestines spilling out after sterilisation at the centre there.
4. Pollachi: At a board-run centre the post-operative care unit sits 2 km away from the surgery centre, and a female dog died of evisceration after surgery.
5. Relocation instead of return: Dogs picked up for sterilisation are extensively relocated in violation of the Rules, and a healthy dog returned to its own locality is the community’s only real-time audit of the money spent.

Why do the surgeries fail?

1. Suturing is rushed: The distance between two suture bites should be under half a centimetre, which takes time. Centres press young veterinarians to complete more surgeries instead.
2. Pain relief is skipped to cut cost: Multi-modal analgesia is omitted, so the animal licks the surgical site and opens the sutures.
3. Suture material is reused: Leftover material causes surgical site infections.
4. The faster male technique is the unsuitable one: The on-scrotal method leaves gaps between sutures for fluid drainage and raises infection risk on unhygienic shelter floors. A veterinarian left an organisation that insisted on more on-scrotal procedures.

How does the payment design create the incentive?

1. The rate is fixed per dog: Rs 1,650 is allocated per dog, including Rs 450 for sterilisation and vaccination and Rs 200 for catching and release.
2. Payment follows projected numbers, not outcomes: Local bodies reward claimed counts rather than verified results, which turns sterilisation into assembly-line work at scale.
3. Catchers are paid per catch: Pups, lactating dogs, pregnant dogs and already sterilised dogs are picked up to raise the count.
4. Ethical care is affordable and skipped anyway: Factoring in economies of scale, a centre can make about Rs 66,000 in profit while still meeting ethical standards of care.

What is the state of verification?

1. Bills clear on the contractor’s own evidence: Payment rests on the organisation’s claims, photographs of surgery, photographs of dogs and occasional organ counts by municipal sanitation officers.
2. The organ count is gamed: A bucket of organs stored at the Oulgaret centre was transported to Neyveli township in Cuddalore district in 2025 to supply an organ counting committee inspection, with the same veterinarian performing surgeries at Neyveli.
3. The committees arrive after the money: In Tiruppur the organ counting committee was constituted only after more than 9,000 surgeries had been billed.
4. The audit questions went unanswered: The Director of Municipal Administration did not answer whether time-tagged photographs, videos of the organ count and destruction of organs were audited for each batch of sterilisation bills, or what the targets were.
5. The corrective is administrative and recent: Corporations have withheld payment on bills raised over the last three months, and a member of the State Monitoring Committee has written to the Municipal Administration Department to withhold bills and constitute panels. Activists have asked instead that community animals be brought under an animal management framework of the Animal Husbandry Department.

Why does blacklisting fail to remove a contractor?

1. Recognition is scarce and contracting is not: Only six organisations hold recognition for ABC procedures in the State, against about 15 contractor organisations operating in the space.
2. A blacklisted operator is re-engaged elsewhere: Pranimitran’s contract was terminated by the Hosur Corporation over animal mutilation, botched surgeries and non-disclosure, and it was blacklisted by the Animal Welfare Board of India. The Tiruppur Corporation engaged it anyway, stating that no replacement contractor could be found.
3. Others continue in place: Jeeva Karunyam of Nagercoil and Rajeshwari Goshala of Tirunelveli continue to work for their local bodies, and two First Information Reports were filed against International Peace Trust at Avadi in Chennai.
4. A criminal case does not interrupt a contract: A First Information Report was filed against Pranimitran over the death of two pups in Tiruppur, and in April 2026 an already sterilised six-year-old dog with a notched ear was found anaesthetised at its centre.

What does the broken cold chain mean for rabies control?

1. Refrigeration is missing: A large majority of centres lack refrigerators capable of holding anti-rabies vaccine at 2 degrees Celsius.
2. Vaccination is simply skipped: A doctor who worked at the Hosur centre states that no vaccines were administered across an average of 650 surgeries a month, with power cuts, no generator and no fresh vaccine batches supplied.
3. Responsibility is contested: The organisation’s position is that the cold chain is supplied and inspected by the Corporation, and that ineffective vaccines would have produced a rabies outbreak.
4. Half the programme then disappears: Sterilisation without a viable vaccine delivers population control alone, and leaves the rabies control purpose of the programme unmet.

Conclusion

The programme’s failure is not a supervision gap that better inspection would close. Payment attaches to a number the contractor supplies, the committee that would verify the number is constituted late or supplied with borrowed evidence, and the certificate that would screen the contractor has been made optional. Blacklisting is therefore a label rather than a disqualification, and a contractor removed in one district is hired in the next. Until money moves against a verified sterilisation and a verified vaccination rather than against a claimed count, no participant in the chain carries a cost for the outcome.

Back2Basics: Animal Welfare Board of India

1. Statutory origin: Established in 1962 under Section 4 of the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960, as the first national animal welfare body of its kind.
2. Function: It advises the Government of India on animal welfare laws and on measures to prevent unnecessary pain to animals, and its recommendations are advisory.
3. Role in this programme: It issues Project Recognition Certificates to organisations conducting Animal Birth Control work, and can blacklist an organisation for violations.
4. Administrative location: It works under the Department of Animal Husbandry and Dairying, and its headquarters moved from Chennai to Ballabhgarh in Haryana.

[2014] Consider the following statements:

1. Animal Welfare Board of India is established under the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986.

2. National Tiger Conservation Authority is a statutory body.

3. National Ganga River Basin Authority is chaired by the Prime Minister.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

(a) 1 only

(b) 2 and 3 only

(c) 2 only

(d) 1, 2 and 3