Making the city’s streets safer not just for stray dogs but for motorists as well are Gautami C., Hari Pavan, Swetha Pinnamaneni and Reshma, who have brought an innovative campaign called Motopaws to the city. The idea is simple — the group goes around the city to where animal-related road accidents have a higher incidence rate and collar stray dogs made by the Pune-based campaign organisers. With a customised collar that’s made with upcycled denim and lined with reflective material, the strays can be spotted from afar in the night, as well as in the day time.
“They’ve been doing it for over eight months now, and I’ve been trying to reach them for quite a while now. Finally we received the collars and the four of us got together to start the drive in Hyderabad on May 22,” says Gautami, who is an entrepreneur. Fitting 20 collars on their first drive in the Kondapur area, Gautami hopes to recruit more volunteers — who need to go through a stringent screening process first — so that they can begin large-scale drives soon. Being a rescue volunteer with the Blue Cross, Gautami says the city really needs it. “Around 80 per cent of the rescue calls we get are for road accidents, so getting more people to help us do this will be really great. Other cities get a lot more collars (Mumbai gets around 100), so we just need more volunteers.”
She adds that they will be targeting areas with higher accident incidence rates: “Mostly, the areas where there are residential buildings right next to main roads with traffic, like Jubilee Hills or Hitec City. The dogs sleep on the roads in the middle of the night and vehicles just run over them. Most of the road accidents we attend to are in those parts of the city.” The Motopaws campaign itself is present in over 20 cities and the campaign organisers ship out the collars to the volunteers in each city once every month, completely free of cost. The volunteers then coordinate with them for the date of the drive — one Sunday a month — and then go about putting the collars on the dogs.
