Tirupati: The Animal Care Land (ACL), a Tirupati-based NGO developed a mobile app for the Tirupati Municipal Corporation (MCT) to have the complete details of the stray dogs, including sterilised and vaccinated, in the city through online by geo-tagging the dogs.
Though it was initially customised for the corporation, the government officials noticed that the mobile application had far wider implications, resulting in the development of 'ULB Dog Sterilisation in AP'.
Making a mark across the 13 districts of AP, the 'ULB Dog Sterilisation in AP' mobile application aimed at gathering a wide range of statistical information linked to the Animal Birth Control-Anti Rabies Vaccination (ABC-ARV) programme.
According to Dr N.V. Srikanth Babu, founder of ACL and co-opted member of Animal Welfare Board of India, still the 110 municipalities in the state have been divided into 30 clusters, and further into Lead Urban Local Bodies (ULBs). The animal welfare organisations and Lead ULBs enter into a MoU for carrying out stray dog sterilisation /vaccination along with capturing of other data.
Srikanth said that The ACL is conducting the programme in 10 clusters in Chittoor, Kadapa, Nellore, Prakasam and Guntur districts and Vijayawada city while the remaining are spearheaded by various NGOs with the financial support of respective civic bodies.
AP has become the role model for other states in adopting latest techniques for the control of stray dogs while the facilities in the ACL here has become a model in birth control and vaccination for stray dogs, he said.
The ACL brought doctors from Kerala to increase the number of sterilisation being done daily in the clusters so as to cover all the dogs in one or two months. There are 1.79 lakh stray dogs in the 13 districts of the state, he said.
All the sterilised and immunised dogs are being Geo-tagged by uploading three photos of each dog at the time of catching, after surgery and at the time of release, he explained.
