What to Read in Indian Express Editorial( Topic and Syllabus wise)

EDITORIAL 1: Tackling stray problem

Context

The Supreme Court recently directed the Delhi government, civic bodies, and authorities of Noida, Gurgaon, and Ghaziabad to round up and move stray dogs to shelters, underlining the urgency in tackling the grim situation.

Status report: Stray dogs and pet dogs

• There are more than 60 million stray dogs in India. Very few of them survive disease and vehicular accidents to die natural deaths.
• Also, someone is bitten by a dog in India every 10 seconds. This works out to more than 3 million bites a year, of which around 5,000 turn out to be fatal.
• Dogs spread more than 60 diseases to people. Rabies alone claims at least two human lives every three hours.
• More than 15,000 tonnes of dog poop and 8 million gallons of dog pee – a major health and environmental hazard – is discharged on Indian roads and fields daily.
• India’s pet dog population was estimated at 30 million in 2024.The population of pet dogs, along with India’s dog food market, has grown at 10-15% per year over the last five years.
• The size of the Indian pet dog industry, currently worth Rs 300 crore, is projected to double by 2030.
• There are upscale dog hotels such as Critterati in Gurgaon, and dog grooming parlours such as Scoopy Scrub in Delhi, Fuzzy Wuzzy in Bengaluru, and Tailwaggers in Mumbai. Companies such as Bajaj Allianz and Future Generali offer dog health insurance.

Various ideas to tackle strays, all ineffective

• Historically, there have been efforts to eliminate the stray dog problem by means including electrocution, poisoning, shooting, or just clubbing them to death.
• But long before the killing of dogs became an animal rights issue, it had become evident that short of elimination en masse, this would not have a lasting effect on the population of strays.
• As food becomes increasingly abundant (garbage dumps, and individual and organised feeders), the partial elimination of the stray population reduces the competition for resources and boosts breeding.
• Thus came the idea of sterilisation.Since 1992, NGOs of India, and various governments have carried out Animal Birth Control (ABC) programmes in several cities.
• In 2001, the Animal Birth Control (Dogs) Rules were notified under the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act, 1960.
• However, unless at least two-thirds of a canine population is sterilised within a small (typically 6-12 months) window, ABC drives fail to have any stabilising effect.
• With the job left to a few NGOs, every Indian city has struggled to achieve the targetthat requires neutering hundreds of stray dogs every day for months. But even if that mark is hit, stray dog populations may still continue to increase.

When pet dogs contribute to stray numbers

• There is no national law in India that requires dog owners to register their pets.A few cities have such rules, but enforcement remains shoddy. It is not mandatory to get pets sterilised or vaccinated either.
• Since owners are not accountable for their dogs or their dogs’ pups, hundreds of unwanted pet dogs and pups are abandoned on the street daily. Also, thousands of pet dogs are allowed to roam or break free and breed with street strays.
• In consequence, even as governments and NGOs continue to neuter a few dogs on the street, pet dogs,thanks to callous owners, add to the stray population. This is also why the so-called ‘Indian street dog’ is mostly mongrels of various crossbreeds.
• The solution, experts say, is to have ABC drives target pedigreed pets with high breeding frequency. The government could offer incentives to owners to get their pets registered and sterilised. A steep tax may be levied on breeding pets.

The problem with petting without owning

• Equally irresponsible is the trend of petting dogs outside the home. In all cities, neighbourhood good samaritans feed stray dogs on the streets outside their homes or workplaces.
• This has the same effect as petting, and turns stray dogs territorial and aggressive.Such feeding has also created monsters of monkeys in many parts of India.
• Over the decades, governments cutting across party lines have sponsored the feeding of stray dogs by various organisations.

Conclusion

Anticipating resistance from some quarters, the Supreme Court warned on Monday that any individual or organisation coming in the way of implementing its order would face legal action. It may widen its gaze to make pet owners and proxy pet feeders accountable when it hears the matter again after six weeks.

 

EDITORIAL 2: Not just climate change

Context

This year’s monsoon has been particularly destructive in the lower Himalaya, causing devastating erosion and flash floods in many parts of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.

The reasons behind

• Without a doubt, rapidly rising temperatures on our planet and the increasing presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere pose an enormous riskto the future of life on Earth as we know it.
• However, automatically blaming erratic weather on climate change often distracts us from the real causes and consequences.
• Unfortunately, this repeated refrain has become an alternative to the old, weather-beaten phrase, “acts of god,” which insurance companies always invoked as a disclaimer.

The Himalayas and problems

• The Himalaya is an extremely unstable region that is vulnerable to the powerful forces of hydrology, erosion and earthquakes. Deforestation and other man-made environmental problems only make things worse.
• What has changed is the indiscriminate, unplanned and often illegal construction of homes, guesthouses, ashrams, hotels, Maggi points and military camps that lie directly in the path of potential flash floods.
• The scarcity of buildable land in the mountains, where level ground is hard to find, drives people to take desperate risks. Margins of streams and rivers, often filled with debris from earlier floods, present a tempting option.
• Add to this political opportunism or bureaucratic complacency and the end result becomes inevitable.
• Much of the recent construction along the Char Dham Yatra route in Uttarakhand is in response to constantly increasing numbers of pilgrimsvisiting sacred sites near the sources of the Ganga.
• These were once remote shrines that devotees approached on foot, but they are now interconnected by ever-widening motor roads, not to mention helicopter services.
• Without some sort of control over the number of visitors that travel through these valleys, the magnitude of forthcoming disasters will only increase.
• The annual flood of religious tourism in Uttarakhand leads to the proliferation of hotels, dhabas and yoga retreats that cater to their needs.
• The majority of these structures are erected along riverbanks where water levels can suddenly rise, washing away everything in their wake.
• In Mussoorie, where new construction had been halted for years by the Supreme Court of India, there is now a surreptitious building boom.
• Many new houses and homestays have been built on precarious foundations, often atop the rubble of earlier landslides. Of course, none of these disasters waiting to happen are the result of climate change.
• Nevertheless, when rain begins to fall and hillsides collapse, we tend to look for causes beyond our own careless greed and indifference.

Conclusion

The true consequences of global warming will be far more profound and prolonged than the natural disasters we are seeing today. Shifting weather patterns and melting glaciers in the Himalaya are certainly part of the outcome. However, by always pointing a finger at climate change, we distance ourselves from the more immediate and avoidable factors that make these crises so horrendous and painfully familiar.