India needs to step up its game on rabies

This article is authored by Keren Nazareth and Dr Piyush Patel.

The continuing prevalence of rabies in India is a multifaceted tragedy, and we should treat it as a public health threat of the highest order. India records millions of animal bites every year, most of them from dogs. It has the highest annual global burden of rabies deaths, at 36%. Thousands of Indians die from rabies every year. It is nearly 100% fatal in cases once clinical symptoms appear, and children living in rural and remote regions are at highest risk of fatal outcomes.

Dogs (HT File)

Compounding this tragedy is the emergent consensus on how public health campaigns can reduce and then eliminate the risk of rabies transmission.

On September 4, 2026, the World Health Organization (WHO) validated Bhutan’s elimination of dog-transmitted human rabies as a public health problem, making it the first country in the WHO South-East Asia Region to achieve this milestone. Bhutan has recorded zero human deaths from dog-mediated rabies since June 2023.

One of the most important factors in Bhutan’s success was the decision of public health authorities there to end the mass sheltering of dogs, which stood in the way of addressing rabies while doing very little to bring animal numbers down and producing some very cruel conditions for animals kept in shelters. Shelters are not a solution to overpopulation or rabies.

The irony is that India has its own proof of concept on a proper solution. We know mass, humane and scientific spay/neuter and vaccinate works – the Supreme court agrees and its order for each district to have a spay/neuter facility indicates this. We have models which go beyond animal birth control and integrate community engagement as well, successfully reducing dog populations, complaints and conflicts over time (Dehradun, Lucknow, Vadodara). The declaration of Goa as a rabies-controlled area by the state’s Animal Husbandry & Veterinary Services Department in 2017 provides a vaccination model. Our resources are limited, let’s use them wisely. It will need simultaneous action--reduce the population, vaccinate dogs, address conflicts, and create infrastructure for humans to receive the care and attention they deserve. Yes, it is possible, if all partners involved — government, administration and people — come together.

India is estimated to have around 70 million street dogs. At roughly ₹1,200 per dog — covering sterilisation, vaccination and all operating costs — a nationwide, one-time vaccination and sterilisation drive would cost approximately ₹8,400 crore a year. The following years of only vaccinating would reduce significantly.

In comparison, let’s look at what a shelter will cost. Building even a modest shelter in each of India's roughly 800 districts, at a conservative ₹2 crore each, comes to ₹1,600 crore just in infrastructure — before a single dog has been fed, treated or cared for. Add the recurring cost of feeding, veterinary care and maintenance for lakhs of dogs kept in captivity for the rest of their natural lives, and the sky’s the limit.

There is something else about Bhutan's story that makes it worth studying. It isn't just the result achieved, but the road it took to get there. Consistent political will, funding, a will to learn, collaboration and literally making it a national enterprise. It took everyone from the King to thousands of community volunteers known as the De-suups, or Guardians of Peace, who carried mass dog vaccination, sterilisation and public awareness into every corner of the country, however remote. No dog left unsterilised.

We too must dig in for the long-run. Rabies immunity from a single vaccine dose fades, and a population of stray dogs turns over constantly through births, deaths and migration. For India, that means:

• Consistent, year-on-year re-vaccination rather than campaign-style drives that lapse once media attention moves on.
• Verified data collection — knowing which dogs, in which wards, have been vaccinated and sterilised, and when they're due again for vaccination, rather than relying on anecdotal coverage estimates.
• A cold chain for vaccines that actually holds up in the field, especially in India's smaller towns and rural stretches where refrigerated storage and transport are hardest to guarantee.
• Trained personnel — veterinarians, catchers and data handlers — in numbers sufficient to cover a country 15 times the size of Bhutan, both in geography and dog population.
• A rapid-response protocol for suspected rabid animals: Isolation, sample collection and laboratory testing, so that outbreaks are caught and contained rather than discovered only after a human death.
• 100% post bite vaccine access to people who may get bitten, be it a pet or a street dog.

If the numbers favour vaccination and sterilisation, the legal framework already supports it, and we see the results not just in Bhutan but in our own nation, the honest question is why aren’t we moving with deliberate speed and single-minded purpose to take the right actions? There seems to be a lack of will to be strategic, humane, scientific and transparent for an issue that isn’t seen from a one health lens.

A shelter is visible — a fence, a building, a photograph, something an official can point to as proof of action after a viral dog-bite story. A vaccination and sterilisation drive is quieter and slower; its success looks like an absence — fewer bites, fewer deaths, a disease curve that flattens over years, not weeks. In the aftermath of a tragedy, removal satisfies public anger in a way that a vaccination camp does not, even though it is the vaccination and sterilisation camp that may actually prevent the next tragedy.

Part of it is institutional. Rabies control in India sits at the intersection of municipal bodies, state animal husbandry departments and the urban development department, with no single authority consistently accountable for outcomes. Animal birth control has historically been treated as an animal welfare issue rather than a public health emergency, even though the two are, as Bhutan's One Health model shows, inseparable.

And part of it is simply capacity. Consistent year-on-year vaccination at national scale requires thousands of trained veterinary staff, functioning cold chains and reliable data systems that many districts do not yet have — the same infrastructure gaps the Supreme Court's May 2026 order finally, if belatedly, tried to address by ordering ABC centres in every district.

We can do this, we need the political and administrative will to back up a single, unglamorous idea: Vaccinate, sterilise the dogs, and keep doing it until the disease has nowhere left to go.

(The views expressed are personal)

This article is authored by Keren Nazareth, senior director, companion animal and engagement team, and Dr Piyush Patel, veterinarian, director, street animal programme, Humane World for Animals India.