What is known.
And what is not.
This is the honest state of the evidence on India's street animals. Where a figure exists it is cited. Where it does not, the gap is named along with whoever is holding the number — because absence is the more useful half of this picture.
Population is published. Almost nothing else is.
Nearly every state has some street-dog population figure, of varying quality and vintage. Sterilisation coverage — the number that decides whether a programme is working — is published for a handful. That asymmetry is the central fact of this field.
Three different kinds of missing.
“No data” hides three separate problems, and they need different fixes. A number nobody ever collected requires fieldwork. A number sitting in a monitoring committee’s returns requires disclosure. A number published only as a city total requires re-release at a usable resolution. Every gap in the register is classified this way.
Held by: Municipal corporations of Delhi; survey implementing agency
Best available today: One city-wide figure of roughly 10 lakh community dogs.
Resolved by: Release of the survey's block-level counts, or a fresh ward-level census with a documented sampling method.
Held by: Municipal corporations; AWBI-recognised ABC centres; state monitoring committees
Best available today: Occasional aggregate claims in press statements, with no verifiable underlying record.
Resolved by: Proactive disclosure of monitoring-committee returns — the data already exists in a reportable form.
Held by: Bodies running ARV drives — municipal, state and NGO
Best available today: Sterilisation coverage of about 45%, which is not a proxy for vaccination.
Resolved by: A common register across the bodies already counting, or a coverage survey to establish a baseline independently.
Held by: Hospitals and ARV clinics; NCDC surveillance reporting
Best available today: National and state totals, with a reported-to-modelled death gap of roughly two orders of magnitude.
Resolved by: Geographic release of bite-incidence data at district or ward level, anonymised.
Held by:
Best available today: Nothing published.
Resolved by: A field health-assessment study with a defined case definition and a stated sampling frame.
Held by:
Best available today: Single-point coverage figures with no follow-up.
Resolved by: Repeat measurement in the same geography on a fixed interval. Cheap relative to the first survey; almost never commissioned.
If it is not sourced, it is not on the page.
Every figure across StrayPaw carries a source, a year and a confidence. Nothing is seeded with plausible examples, no register is pre-filled to look busy, and no chart is padded with an estimate dressed as a measurement. Where we have nothing, the page says so.