CHENNAI: The Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) has floated tenders for designing and implementing a comprehensive platform, comprising software and mobile applications, for the identification and end-to-end management of community and pet dog records, along with the supply of implantable microchips.
With this, the city corporation, which is the nodal body for designing the portal, plans to keep track of information such as dog bite cases, abandonment of pet dogs which adds to the stray dog population and ensuring that community dogs captured by the GCC for animal birth control (ABC) are not relocated, in accordance with the ABC Act.
People can report animal cruelty, and download international travel certificates for pets, access a pet licensing portal with payment gateways and renewal reminders and even a provision for adoption of orphaned animals, through this platform.
“While the civic body is preparing it as a state-wide portal, we are yet to work out details of how it will be implemented,” a corporation official said.
The software platform will have a master dashboard for state-level animal welfare monitoring and at the local body level for municipal corporations, municipalities and districts. This will be used to put together and monitor information under various heads like dog categories (pet/community/abandoned), sterilisation and vaccination status, disease outbreaks, location of community or abandoned dogs’ capture, breeder registrations, cruelty complaints, and dog bite incidents.
The system will also include a GPS-enabled mobile app for dog catchers with photo integration and a portal for veterinary records. To facilitate state-wide adoption, the system will be hosted on a Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology-approved cloud platform. The platform will integrate data from existing GCC pet licensing systems.
According to the tender documents, microchips are to be implanted in the animals to control complaints of abandoned pet dogs in the city. The microchips will have details such as the owner’s name, address, mobile number, species, breed, colour, sex, age, vaccination status and a unique identification number recognised by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR). These are not GPS trackers but RFID-based identification tools for tracking.
The tender conditions require the contractor to conduct yearly training programmes at zonal levels for officials, veterinarians, and dog catchers and public awareness campaigns on microchipping and licensing to ensure 100% compliance.
Pet dog owners in Chennai are to apply for licences via the GCC’s online platform. However, only 9,500 licences have been issued so far, though the number of pet dogs in the city, as per GCC estimates, exceeds one lakh. The existing tracking system records only pet numbers and vaccination status.