Prepare action plan to check dog attacks: Telangana HC to GHMC

Telangana High Court warns authorities to take action against stray dog attacks, instructs GHMC to prepare action plan.

Telangana High Court on Wednesday warned the authorities that callousness in checking attacks of stray dogs on people would not be tolerated.

A bench of Chief Justice Alok Aradhe and Justice Anil Kumar Jukanti, hearing a suo motu taken up PIL petition on attacks of stray dogs on people in Hyderabad, instructed the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) and other departments to constitute a committee to prepare an action plan on the matter within a week. The HC has taken up a report published in The Hindu last year over a pack of dogs mauling a boy to death in Amberpet suo motu as PIL petition. The bench also took a serious view of a report by published by another newspaper about the death of another student following attack by stray dogs recently at Patancheru on city outskirts.

These two reports over the dog attacks and another PIL petition filed by a resident of Vanasthalipuram were tagged as a batch of petitions and heard by the bench on Wednesday. After perusing a report filed by the GHMC officials that nearly 600 dogs were sterilised in Jubilee Hills and Banjara Hills areas, the bench said that government should note that dog attacks were not being reported in such localities.

The official machinery should focus on slums and other areas where such instances were being reported, the bench said. It was not about the statistics like how many dogs were sterilised. ‘What action was being initiated to ensure such instances did not recur was important,’ the bench said. The authorities should not look at the dog attacks as individual cases. Instead they should act upon creating plans to check such instances, the bench said. The matter was posted July 18 for next hearing.