Every lane and bylane of Margao city and the adjoining Fatorda constituency is over populated with stray dogs;
The dog pound has rusty cages, tattered and torn tarpaulins as cover, no guard, no staff in the evening, multiple veterinary doctors who leave the job since they’re not paid, a broken vehicle and a filthy center for the dogs.
“How do you expect me to run this place? We have been on this leased piece of land since 2007 and are struggling”, SGWTA member and full time employee, Sandra Fernandes.
After the new MMC leadership took over it cleared a 8 month backlog of salaries until December 2015, a few days ago. “But we have not received any payments, again since January 2016” added Ms Fernandes. She said that her resources are limited and they catch and neuter limited dogs, since they have just 20 cages, though a little while back, the MMC had promised 30 more cages. There seems to be no sign of the MMC officials however.
The MMC, along with MLAs Digambar Kamat and Vijai Sardesai had promised the SGWTA that additional land would be acquired and that the facility would be moved to a bigger space, but that too is a promise not met by the MMC. Incidentally, Vijai Sardesai way back in 2012, had made the stray dogs menace his first issue when he made his debut in the Goa Legislative Assembly.
“Though I am the chairman of the SGWTA and have given them huge donations, I have allowed Dilip Prabhudesai, as secretary to look into the dog pound, so he will get a larger picture and not me,” stated Vijai Sardesai”
“We aim to visit each ward a day and cover 25 wards to bring dogs for sterilization daily but it’s not possible when people are not paid a salary. Even worse, the vehicle given to us to round up stray dogs, goes for repairs to the MMC workshop. In case the machine breaks, it never comes back until the eighth or tenth day. We hope this situation will change,” said an employee.
But Joybern Coelho from Fatorda’s ward 10, tells us that the facility is open only from 10 to 12 pm and to visitors only from 1pm to 2pm making it inaccessible to discuss the stray dog menace in a certain area. Even worse, citizens in Borda allege that the facility treats private dogs for free from across Nuvem, Verna, Loutolim, Curtorim and Raia, thus keeping cages engaged and the trust does not really do its job diligently.
The Chairperson’s Dilip Prabhudessai, secretary of SGWTA asserted that the Margao Municipal Council recently passed a resolution to increase funding from Rs 25,000 to 50,000 to the trust for salaries and expenses and he promised that things will change.
When the last council term was completed, they had not paid monthly payments since the beginning of November 2014. The old council had also held back the decision to increase the amount of Rs 25,000 for the new council.
Past promises of increasing the number of cages and allocating more land to the NGO were not fulfilled by the past council.
