The city’s stray canine count shows no sign of decline, despite neutering drives carried out by NGOs. A Telegraph picture

Organisations that neuter strays to keep the city’s roving canine population in check will henceforth have to preserve each removed organ in formalin for them to be paid for their services.

The rule has been introduced by the Calcutta Municipal Corporation, which has to share the cost of the sterilisation programme with the Animal Welfare Board from the next fiscal. An NGO is paid Rs 445 for neutering a dog, but could soon be getting Rs 600 for it. The proposal for an increase in the fee is under consideration, officials said.

Calcutta’s stray dog population is estimated to be 42,000, up from 35,600 in December 2006. Surveys indicate that the Tiljala-Topsia-Ballygunge belt is the most canine-infested pocket of the city. North Calcutta, in comparison, is better off.

The secretary of the Union environment and forest ministry, D. Rajasekar, told municipal commissioner Alapan Bandyopadhyay last month that the CMC must share the escalating cost of neutering stray canines. Strained by the financial burden, the civic authorities decided that payments would not be made without proof.

“We have asked the state animal welfare board to take up the responsibility of counting preserved organs,” chief municipal health officer Deb Dwaipayan Chattopadhyay said.

Corporation officials said the concept of neutering dogs, though accepted as a more “humane practice” than rounding up canines and annihilating them, had not produced results in Calcutta. “Sterilisation of stray dogs has been carried out in the city for about a decade now, albeit without any decline in their population,” one of them said.

Sushmita Roy of Love-n-Care for Animals, one of the NGOs that neuters street dogs, said she had no objection to the system of preserving removed organs as proof. “I have only one condition, which is that the civic authorities should take the responsibility of destroying the organs immediately after counting.”