The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) has asked non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and private agencies to come forward to help with their sterilisation as the complaints of stray cats in various parts of mumbai is growing.
It is pertinent to note that, this move comes at a time when there has been a rise in the lumpy skin disease cases. Besides in order to curb the spread, the civic body has already issued guidelines for the same.
However, BMC dog control officers have noticed that as the population of stray dogs in certain areas has gone down, the number of stray cats has increased.
The civic body has set aside a sum of INR 1 crore for the project in the current year, with INR 2,000 per cat sterilised set as the price.
It runs a moderately successful animal birth control (ABC) project to curb the population of stray dogs in the city and suburbs.
As per the corporation’s Health Department, 33,166 dogs were sterilised in the past two years. Accordingly, civic officials stated that if dogs are fewer, then the number of cats increases.
Therefore, in order to constraint the number of cats in the city, they have issued an advertisement and appealed to NGOs and agencies to come forward to sterilise stray cats. The last date for accepting proposals was today, September 20.
Moreover, it has also come to light that that there had been no census of stray dogs and cats in the city since 2014. It was to be done in 2020 but the pandemic intervened. However, the exercise is now likely to be carried out next January, officials exclaimed.
So far, only about 5,700 cats have been sterilised by the two organisations involved in the work since 2019.