UP CM visits Sitapur, meets families affected by feral dog menace

Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath visited Sitapur district today and met family members of the children who had come under attacks from feral dogs.

His visit came a day after the Allahabad High Court asked the Uttar Pradesh government to spell out the steps being taken up to curb the menace of feral dogs which had claimed the lives of 12 children in the district since last November.

The chief minister, who also visited the district hospital to see two injured children, stressed the need to launch a drive against the dogs which have turned violent.

"There is a need to launch a drive, an awareness drive against the dogs. We have reached a conclusion that these are not pet dogs but those that have turned violent and attack innocent children when they move about alone," he said.

The chief minister announced a compensation of Rs 2 lakh to each family which had lost a child and Rs 25,000 to every injured child.

Some 22 villages of Khairabad block are affected by the dog menace.

Adityanath issued directives to the administration to ensure that the villages were made open defecation free.

The chief minister later went to village Gurpalia where two children were killed by dogs and took stock of measures adopted by the administration to counter the menace.

Moving into new areas of the district, the ferocious dogs had injured two children yesterday.

While 7-year-old Abhishek was attacked by a pack of dogs in Machreta block, Geeta (9) was injured in the worst-hit Khairabad area, where six children have died this month in similar attacks.

Twelve children have been killed by dogs in Sitapur since last November, District Magistrate Sheetal Verma said.

The attacks have generated such fear that school attendance has dipped, the police conduct patrols and men go to work in their orchards and fields armed with rods and axes.

Verma said the latest case in Machreta block indicated that the dogs have now crossed the river and reached new areas from Khairabad.

The area under the threat of dogs is also under drone camera surveillance, she said.

So far, 42 dogs have been sent for sterilisation to Lucknow, she said.

Teams from WWF and Indian Veterinary Research Institute (IVRI), Bareilly, have collected samples such as pug marks, bite-marks and post-mortem reports from the district in recent days.

IVRI director R K Singh said the dogs used to feed on scraps from the slaughter houses in surrounding areas, but were not getting their regular diet now and had turned ferocious.

The state government has been shutting down illegal abattoirs over the past several months.

Dinesh Chandra Chaubey, who headed the IVRI team, said detailed tests would be conducted in Hyderabad on samples collected from dogs killed by angry villagers.

Sitapur's District Inspector of Schools, Devki Singh, said schools in Khairabad have seen a big dip in attendance since May 1. Parents have been issued directions that adults should accompany children to and from school.

On May 1, three children were mauled to death by dogs in villages of Khairabad area after which the district administration called in a team from Mathura to catch the animals, officials said.

On May 4, two more children were mauled to death.

Veterinarian Anoop Gautam said dogs tend to become more violent when there is a shortage of food. There is also a chance that some nomads may have set their dogs free, he said.

Taking cognizance of the repeated incidence of such attacks in Sitapur, the Allahabad High Court had yesterday asked the Uttar Pradesh government to spell out the steps being taken up to curb the menace of feral dogs.

However, it was felt that the problem may not be limited to Sitapur but may exist in other parts of the state as well.

The bench comprising Justice Vikram Nath and Justice Abdul Moin passed the order on a PIL moved by a local lawyer and granted a month's time to the state government to place its report before the court fixing July 4 as the next date of hearing.

In the PIL, the petitioner had sought identification and removal of "man-eating" dogs thereby protecting the lives of innocent children and people.

The petitioner had demanded compensation to the families of victims of dog attacks.

Hearing the petition, the court said, "In the recent past, repeated reports have been coming that in Sitapur feral dogs have killed at least a dozen children and caused injuries to many more. The problem of feral dogs targeting young and small children may not only be confined to Sitapur but could be a state-wide problem."