Everywhere Sudarshan Birla went after moving to Mumbai last year, an unlikely resident greeted him: the community cat. They perched on compound walls in Colaba, stretched beneath parked cars in Worli, and basked in the afternoon sun in Juhu. Some welcomed a gentle pat; others watched the city from a distance with the indifference only cats have perfected.
Like many cat lovers, Birla instinctively reached for his phone. He photographed them, sometimes sharing the images on Instagram. “I’ve always loved documenting,” says the 25-year-old IIT Guwahati graduate. Soon, his camera roll had become an archive of Mumbai’s unofficial feline residents. But there was one problem: the photographs remained scattered, buried among thousands of other images.
That frustration eventually became Meowmbai, a community-powered platform that allows people to photograph, document and discover community cats across the city. What began as one person’s photo gallery has rapidly evolved into a crowdsourced map of Mumbai’s street cats—and increasingly those of other Indian cities, including Delhi, Bengaluru, Pune, and Chennai. “It’s a collective community platform where anyone can spot, document and explore community cats,” Birla explains. “Every photograph becomes a memory—not just for me, but for everyone who enjoys documenting them.”
A product manager by profession, Birla built the platform himself using AI coding tools. He also reviews every submission personally before it goes live, balancing a full-time job with late-night coding sessions, feature updates and content moderation. “I’ve always enjoyed building things outside work,” he Birla, who is also a filmmaker. “Tech has become so much more accessible now. I realised I could turn ideas into reality much faster than I had imagined.”
The response has surprised even him. Within a month of launch, Meowmbai attracted more than 10,000 users and documented over 1,240 cats in Mumbai alone. Most of that growth, Birla says, has come organically through social media, search engines and, above all, people’s affection for cats. The community has also shaped the platform’s evolution. What launched as a simple map has steadily expanded through user feedback. Visitors can now name cats they encounter—a feature born from the internet’s collective inability to resist christening neighbourhood felines. More neighbourhoods have been added on request, and users can post alerts for missing cats.
Yet Birla is careful about the platform’s purpose. “We are not tracking a cat’s live location,” he says. “That could create safety issues.” Instead, each photograph is tied only to the place where it was taken, creating a visual record rather than a real-time surveillance system. As conversations with animal welfare organisations have grown, Birla has also begun to see a more practical role for the project. Location-based documentation, he believes, could eventually support sterilisation drives, identify neighbourhoods with large unneutered populations and help NGOs direct resources more effectively. Features that allow users to indicate whether a cat appears neutered are already being explored. “I’m trying to learn as much as I can from NGOs, feeders and people who have worked with community cats,” he says. “I’m new to this space. I want to understand the problems before building something.”
His affection for cats, interestingly, predates the platform but not by much. He never grew up with a pet. Instead, his fondness began with a community cat that regularly visited his home while he was in school and deepened among the many cats roaming the IIT Guwahati campus during college. Today, despite wanting to adopt one, he knows his demanding schedule would make responsible pet ownership difficult. “Until then,” he smiles, “I just love spending time with community cats.”
The platform has also revealed an unexpected portrait of Mumbai itself. Fort, Andheri, Versova and Lower Parel have emerged as some of the city’s most cat-documented neighbourhoods, suggesting that its feline residents are as much a part of the urban landscape as its cafés, heritage buildings and bustling streets. Birla hopes Meowmbai will eventually grow beyond cats to include community dogs and other urban wildlife. But that ambition, he says, can wait. “I first want to understand cats properly. Only then would I think of expanding.”
For now, the mission remains refreshingly modest. Every uploaded photograph preserves a small moment in the life of a creature most people walk past without noticing. Together, those images become something larger: a portrait of Mumbai told not through monuments or skylines, but through the cats lazily watching it from the sidelines.