Commons vs the Custodian: When the Supreme Court errs on commons
“A city is not a handful of exclusive Resident Welfare Associations and its residents, or the private property owners, to dictate who gets to participate in land uses.”
One late evening in Mumbai, we took a sick street cat to a charitable animal hospital. That day, she did not need food but an urgent vet visit. As we stood in the queue, we saw people from all walks of life, labourers, municipal workers, blue-collar employees, waiting with animals that were not necessarily “owned.” An autorickshaw pulled up; four barefoot labourers carried a dog in a sack. For a moment, we thought he was dead. He was alive but gravely ill. Without discussion, the queue parted, and the vet took him first. When we asked what had happened, one man replied, “Yeh humāre chawl ka kuttā hai” (He’s our chawl’s dog). Two things struck us. First, daily-wage earners could bring their community dog to the vet only after work hours and contribute collectively for treatment, even at a highly subsidised clinic. Second, the chawl was more than housing. It was an intimate territory where people and animals were bound together by everyday recognition and responsibility. No Resident Welfare Association (RWA) circular captures that reality.
Looking back, what stayed with us was not simply the act of compassion but the quiet labour that made such care possible. Someone fed the dog regularly. Someone noticed when it stopped eating. Someone collected money for treatment. Someone accompanied him to the hospital after a long day of work. These mundane acts are rarely recognised as forms of urban development. Yet they participate in building a particular kind of city: one held together not merely by property rights and municipal regulations, but by relationships of maintenance, care, and shared responsibilities. These responsibilities operate through volunteering, welfare associations, and the kindness of street vendors and small shopkeepers who go beyond self-interest to nurture this built environment of care. It is equally important to acknowledge that dog attacks and rabies deaths in Indian cities are real and devastating. One widely reported case was the death of a kabaddi player bitten by a puppy he was trying to rescue from a drain. Such incidents, amplified in news cycles and WhatsApp groups, fuel anxieties and shape urban debates. The concern is not fabricated. But policy forged in panic rarely addresses the root causes it claims to solve.
When safety becomes an excuse for exclusion
The Supreme Court’s recent order directing the removal of street dogs from residential areas, echoed by the Rajasthan High Court, presents itself as decisive action for public safety. In reality, it pits private property logic against the idea of the commons, shrinking the latter to a narrow, exclusionary frame. It privileges the voices of property owners, often speaking through RWAs, over the lived knowledge of those who share public space with non-human cohabitants. By framing the “dog menace” as a problem of presence rather than governance, the order absolves the State, our custodian, of its responsibility to maintain functional public health systems, to budget for sterilisation and vaccination, to manage waste, and to partner with communities that live in negotiated harmony with street animals. Instead, the State shifts from organiser to evacuator: “remove them” is easier than “govern them.” The order rests on a false choice: protect humans or allow street animals to remain. Public health does not demand removal; it demands infrastructure. Rabies and bite risks fall when cities vaccinate dogs at scale, sterilise and return them to their territories, and close access to open garbage dumps. Relocation undermines these goals. Remove sterilised, vaccinated dogs, and unvaccinated, unsterilized ones will move in, often increasing risk.
No city can humanely house hundreds of thousands of dogs; converting surgery centres into kennels chokes the sterilisation pipeline. Ethically, warehousing sentient beings for the comfort of a few is a poor index of civic maturity. Beneath the health rhetoric lies a politics of exclusion. “Remove the dogs” often means restoring streets to the exclusive enjoyment of titleholders. RWAs, emboldened by such orders, may issue feeding bans, instruct guards to “discourage” caregivers, or tell them to take the animal’s home. This ignores ecological and social reality: animals do not observe property boundaries, and cities are not private foyers for a select few. Dogs, cats, cows, and even monkeys are part of the co-evolutionary story of human settlement. Their removal by decree neither erases this history nor resolves the negotiations urban coexistence demands. Even “humane” relocation orders legitimise harassment of caregivers and reinforce the idea that animals must either be owned or absent. The familiar retort, “If you care, keep it inside your flat”, forces animals into a property-law frame they have never inhabited. Community animals are not trespassers; they are residents of use, not title.
From panic to governance: a commons-based approach
Elinor Ostrom’s work on commons governance offers a better compass. Shared resources endure when rules are co-created locally, monitoring is collective, sanctions are proportionate, conflict resolution is accessible, and higher law supports rather than overrides local pacts. Applied to the street, this means municipal vets, public-health workers, sanitation staff, RWAs, caregivers, and residents co-designing place-specific protocols: feeding spots away from gates, bite-response plans, vaccination logs, and sterilisation schedules, backed by reliable budgets, cold-chain systems, and animal transport. Yet commons are not sustained through rules alone. They are also built into existence through material infrastructures of care. If governance concerns how people collectively manage shared space, building concerns how that space is continuously produced and maintained. Across Indian cities, caregivers, neighbourhood groups, and animal welfare organisations routinely create water points during heatwaves, temporary shelters during monsoons, recovery spaces for injured or sterilised animals, putting collar on community dogs/cats as a marker of coexistence, designated feeding areas, and informal veterinary support networks. Small and often improvised, these interventions nevertheless shape how humans and animals inhabit the city together. They turn anonymous urban spaces into sites of shared stewardship and show that coexistence is not only negotiated through law but actively constructed through everyday acts of maintenance and care.
Such infrastructure already exists, yet receives little recognition within formal planning frameworks. Organisations such as PAWS in Delhi, local animal welfare groups in Bengaluru, and community volunteers in several neighbourhoods across Kerala and Chennai have helped create temporary shelters, feeding stations, recovery spaces, and water points for community animals. These interventions may appear modest compared to flyovers, gated complexes, or smart-city projects, yet they are no less involved in the production of urban life. A commons-based approach, therefore, requires more than resisting eviction; it requires investment in the infrastructures that make coexistence possible. Municipalities could support neighbourhood-level shelters, community-managed feeding zones, veterinary outreach programmes, and publicly accessible vaccination systems. Rather than treating care as a private moral choice, cities could recognise it as a public function that contributes to collective wellbeing and to the making of a more inclusive urban commons. One such way is to tag collars on community non-humans and coordinate with informal groups in housing societies, community feeders, small shopkeepers, and street vendors.
This is not laissez-faire but structured stewardship, recognising that safety and compassion can be co-produced through systems integrating public health with the ethics of shared space. The shift must be from fear to systems: treat rabies prevention and dog-bite control as measurable goals, not one-off raids. Maintaining high vaccination rates for free-roaming dogs, continuing sterilisation with return to the site to maintain territorial stability, and ensuring free, easy access to human post-exposure prophylaxis can be considered. This does not deny fear or grief. It replaces eviction with governance, panic with practice. Safety and animal welfare are not rival goods; they grow from the same infrastructure: vaccination, sterilisation, waste discipline, and shared norms. Back in the chawl, “our dog” was not a sentimental phrase; it was an institutional claim to stewardship. The men who carried that dog were not owners in a registry; they were custodians in practice. A city that criminalises such care, or expels its object, becomes a brittle diagram, tidy on paper, combustible in life.
The Global South does not need an urbanism that sanitises streets by erasing life and calls it order. It needs a doctrine of the urban commons, one that recognises community animals as part of the civic fabric, insists on robust public-health systems, and balances rights with shared duties. Cities do not become humane by avoiding conflict; they become humane by governing it, engaging with it, seriously, scientifically, and with eyes open. Such a doctrine must also recognise that cities are built not only through concrete, property, and capital but also through maintenance, repair, and care. The infrastructures that sustain coexistence are often small, dispersed, and collectively produced, yet they remain indispensable to urban life. A feeding station, a water point, a recovery shelter, or a community vaccination drive may not appear in master plans, but each contributes to the making of a more livable city. The dog at the gate is not an intruder to be removed. They are a neighbour whose presence reminds us that governance, not disappearance, is the truest measure of a city’s civility. The challenge before Indian cities is therefore not simply how to regulate community animals, but how to build the institutions, infrastructures, and everyday practices of care that allow shared urban life to flourish.
References
Ostrom, Elinor. 2015. Governing the commons: The evolution of institutions for collective action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Devansh Shrivastava is an independent researcher. He holds a PhD in Public Policy from the National Law School of India University. His research examines property-making, law and tenure changes in Indian cities. His research has been published in the Journal of Law and Society and PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review.
Kunal Shahdeo is a sociologist and Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University, Ranchi.
His research interests include small-town urbanisation, indigeneity, and rethinking cities
beyond anthropocentric frameworks.
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