Every evening now, the same scene repeats outside schools, hospitals, and residential lanes across Srinagar: children walking in tight clusters, parents scanning corners before letting them run ahead, elderly residents carrying sticks not for support but for defence. What used to be a stray dog here and there has become packs, and the packs have grown bolder.

The numbers explain why. Srinagar alone is estimated to house over 64,000 stray dogs, with some surveys placing the count above 91,000, roughly one dog for every 12 residents. Jammu and Kashmir recorded over 2.13 lakh dog bite cases between 2022 and 2025, with the Kashmir division accounting for 1,14,498 of them and Srinagar city alone reporting 36,406. Bite cases jumped from 93,765 in 2024 to 1,12,695 in 2025, a rise of nearly 20,000 in a single year. The Union Territory now averages 150 bites a day. In the first six months of 2025 alone, at least three people died of rabies, among them a six-year-old child from Kulgam.

Credit is due where it exists. Anti-rabies clinics in Srinagar, seeing 30 to 35 victims daily, have kept treatment flowing despite the volume. Sanitation workers and volunteers who report and manage strays in their localities have done what individuals reasonably can. Their effort has not been the failure here.

The failure sits with the institutions meant to plan ahead of the crisis, not react to it. The Srinagar Municipal Corporation’s sterilisation drives have run for years without ever matching the pace of breeding, and open garbage dumping across the city, a problem flagged repeatedly by residents and civic bodies alike, continues to feed strays a steady food supply that keeps their numbers climbing. Citizens who dump waste in the open or feed dogs without supporting sterilisation add to the load. But the primary responsibility lies with the administration that manages waste collection and animal control as separate, underfunded departments instead of one connected problem. A city marketed as a “smart city” has not managed to keep its streets safe for a child walking to school.

This is not a new failure. Srinagar has debated its stray dog population for over a decade, launching sterilisation pilots and garbage management schemes that lose momentum once public attention moves elsewhere. The pattern itself is the crisis, not any single mauling.

The Constitution guarantees the right to life under Article 21, a right that does not pause at a municipal budget line. A government that cannot secure its own streets has secured very little at all. Safety promised year after year, and delivered in none of them, is not safety delayed. It is safety denied.