The Centre has asked the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) to bear half the cost of sterilising stray dogs in the city.

The Animal Welfare Board of India, which functions under the Union environment & forests ministry, has directed the civic body to provide matching grants to the NGOs carrying out the animal birth control/anti-rabies (ABC/AR) programme in Calcutta on its behalf.

“The ABC scheme will be funded hereafter only when the CMC agrees to pay a 50 per cent grant to the NGOs implementing the programme. This is applicable to all metros and A-1 cities,” board secretary D. Rajasekar has written to civic commissioner Alapan Bandyopadhyay. “I’m yet to receive a copy of the circular. But it goes without saying that the stray dogs sterilisation programme is a worthy cause,” the commissioner told Metro.

The core CMC areas — between Shyambazar and Dhakuria — have around 60,000 stray dogs of virile age, which need to be sterilised to reduce the threat of rabies. The ABC/AR programme was started in 1996 and the annual human death from rabies came down from 50 to 10 over the next six years.

“It’s imperative that we increase the sterilisation count every year, but our efforts will be thwarted if the central grant dries up,” said Debasis Chakrabarti, the managing trustee of People for Animals, the lead NGO in the civic body’s ABC/AR programme.