India's ABC Programme Promises to Control Stray Dog Populations, Here Is Where Sterilisation Fails

The Animal Birth Control (ABC) Rules, first notified in 2001 and significantly revised in 2023, require every municipal body in India to sterilise and vaccinate free-roaming dogs, return them to their original location, and maintain ward-level records. The programme does not permit culling, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld this, and it draws on the World Health Organisation's position that mass killing of street dogs does not sustainably reduce their population, because surviving dogs from adjoining areas simply move in to fill the vacuum. The biological mechanism behind this is well established: dogs are territorial, and a sterilised, vaccinated, resident dog actively keeps out new entrants. Remove the dog, and you remove the territory holder.
The ABC Programme is also the country's primary rabies-control instrument. India accounts for roughly 36 percent of global rabies deaths, with most transmission coming from dog bites. Sterilisation alone does not prevent rabies, that requires the vaccination component running in parallel. The two are supposed to be inseparable under the rules.
Where the ABC Programme has been implemented consistently and at scale, the evidence is real. Jaipur is the most cited example in Indian public health literature. A sustained programme there, run in partnership with Help in Suffering, an animal welfare NGO, achieved measurable reduction in both dog population density and rabies incidence over a period of roughly a decade. The key was coverage: sterilising and vaccinating at least 70 percent of the dog population in a defined area before moving to the next. Below that threshold, the territorial replacement effect does not kick in and population pressure continues.
The science of canine reproduction makes the threshold non-negotiable. A female dog reaches sexual maturity between six and twelve months and can produce two litters a year, with an average of six pups per litter. Sterilise 50 percent of females in a ward and the remaining 50 percent compensate within eighteen months. The programme has to outrun the reproductive rate, or it is running in place.

Most municipal bodies are nowhere near 70 percent coverage. The reasons are structural, not incidental.
Funding is the first constraint. The ABC Programme is funded through municipal budgets, which in most tier-2 and tier-3 cities are already stretched thin. Animal birth control competes directly with road repair, water supply, and solid waste management for the same rupee. The result is that sterilisation drives tend to happen in bursts, a few months of activity, then a long gap, rather than the sustained, ward-by-ward saturation the rules require.

Capacity is the second constraint. Performing a sterilisation surgery requires a veterinarian, an operating table, anaesthesia, post-operative care, and a recovery space. Many municipal animal shelters lack even basic infrastructure. Cities like Bengaluru and Hyderabad have contracted the work out to NGOs and private vets, which works when the contracts are funded and monitored. When payment is delayed, and it frequently is, the NGO stops operating and the pipeline empties.
Record-keeping is the third constraint, and arguably the most invisible failure. The rules require ear-notching or microchipping of sterilised dogs and ward-level registers. In practice, most wards have no functional database. The same dog can be brought in for surgery twice because nobody can verify it has already been sterilised. Conversely, entire pockets of a ward go unworked because there is no map of where coverage has and has not been achieved.

Street dog management in India operates inside a political pressure system that the ABC Programme was not designed to handle. When a dog bite incident is reported, and with 17 to 18 lakh dog bites reported annually across government hospitals, incidents happen constantly, the local municipal councillor faces immediate constituent pressure to act. The response that looks decisive is removal: catch the dogs, take them somewhere, make them disappear from the ward.
This is where the programme breaks. Relocation is explicitly prohibited under the ABC Rules because it disrupts the territorial structure that makes sterilisation effective. A relocated dog, dropped in an unfamiliar area, becomes aggressive, loses its vaccinated status in the records, and the original territory opens up to unsterilised newcomers. But the political incentive runs entirely in the other direction. The councillor who visibly acts gets credit. The one who explains population dynamics to an angry constituent does not.
Animal welfare organisations that run ABC operations on municipal contracts are caught in this loop. They sterilise dogs in a ward, return them, and then receive calls from the same ward three weeks later demanding the dogs be removed because a resident complained. Complying means undoing the territorial protection they just built. Refusing means the contract is under threat.
The cities where ABC has worked share a few features that are absent in the cities where it has not. First, a dedicated budget line that cannot be raided for other uses mid-year. Second, a third-party monitoring system, not self-reporting by the municipal body, that tracks ward-level coverage against a target. Third, a grievance mechanism for dog bite incidents that is separate from the sterilisation programme, so that one complaint does not derail an entire ward's coverage schedule.
Pune has made partial progress on the monitoring piece, with some wards maintaining digitised records. Chennai has experimented with GPS tagging. Neither city has solved the funding continuity problem. The gap between the cities that have tried and the cities that have not is less about intent than about whether the municipal commissioner treats ABC as a public health programme or as an animal welfare nicety that can wait.
The ABC Programme is not broken by design. It is broken by the distance between what the rules require and what the average municipal budget and political cycle can sustain. Sterilisation works when it is relentless. The Indian municipal system is built for intermittent.