Visakhapatnam: The Greater Visakhapatnam Municipal Corporation is making an effort to keep stray dogs off the city in view of the upcoming Global Investment Summit and the G-20 meeting here.
The stray dog menace is widely being discussed in the two Telugu states following a canine attack on a four-year-old boy in Hyderabad recently.
“We have activated our animal birth control programme and are conducting 70 operations a day. The city has 1.10 lakh stray dogs spread over eight zones. We have sterilized over 90,000 so far. The remaining 20,000 will be covered over the next few months,’’ said GVMC additional deputy commissioner Viswanadha Rao.
Rao said sterilisation operations and administration of rabies vaccine were being done in the Arilova centre and two more such units would be opened at Gopalapatnam and Gandhigram.
“The number of dog catchers will be increased. As per the animal welfare board guidelines, the caught dogs will be released in the same place after the operations, where they were picked up.”
The Covid-19 season killed one-fourth of the dogs as street vending of food had stopped during the period in the city and animal lovers had been prevented by the police from distributing food to dogs in public places.
“Yet, the dog population is increasing annually at the rate of 20 per cent,’’ said founder president of Visakha Society for Protection and Care of Animals, Pradeep Nath.
Nath said initially, the GVMC and VSPCA had jointly conducted animal birth control programmes, in 1998, when the people complained bitterly about stray dogs menace. In later years, the agreement was cancelled and GVMC and VSPCA launched their own programmes, which did not prove to be very effective.
