New Delhi, Nov. 11 -- There are moments when the law, in its anxious search for order, forgets the living pulse of the country it seeks to govern; moments when judicial pronouncements reveal India's peculiar talent for turning a manageable issue into a full-blown crisis. The direction to remove and permanently relocate every community dog from all public institutions has done just that. It took what was essentially a question of civic management and turned it into an administrative nightmare. It is, to be blunt, a monumental folly, a verdict of disconnect that threatens to substitute sound science with a reckless, impractical fantasy. The problem was never the dogs. It was, and continues to be, the utter collapse of civic systems meant to manage them. Municipal sterilisation programmes exist only on paper. Waste lies scattered across our streets and campuses. Hospitals dump food and biomedical waste in the open. And when dogs gather where food and filth do, the response is not to fix the cause, but to punish the symptom. One only wishes the Hon'ble Court had paused to look at the real condition of our public institutions. So many of our government schools often have no functioning toilets. Children sit on damp floors, under leaking roofs, in classrooms with broken windows and no electricity. District hospitals are so overcrowded that patients lie in corridors, while bins overflow with food and biomedical waste. Bus terminals are little more than open fields with sheds. And our railways, which still struggle to keep their tracks safe, are now expected to hermetically seal thousands of stations against dogs. Our local municipalities have not been able to implement Animal Birth Control (ABC) in 25 years and yet they must now not only run ABC programmes but also build and run shelters that do not exist. Asking a broken system to perform a miracle is not a solution. It is an admission of failure. It shows we have given up on fixing the real problems. And where, pray, is this parallel universe of "designated shelters"? The existing shelters are woefully few, perpetually underfunded, and drowning in suffering. This order will not conjure them from thin air. It will lead to the only practical outcome possible; dogs will be picked up, driven to the city's edge, and dumped into a neighbouring district's jurisdiction, or left to starve in makeshift, hellish pounds. We aren't solving a problem; we're shifting its geography and increasing its cruelty. And is this the India we are building - a country that takes away the very animals people have cared for, sterilised, and protected for decades? Are these the values we wish to uphold? Across India, citizens have quietly worked with compassion and patience to stabilise community dog populations, ensuring they are vaccinated, sterilised, and accepted as part of the neighbourhood they belong to. They have done, without recognition or reward, the work that municipalities should have done themselves. Now, all that effort stands to be undone. Dogs who have lived peacefully for years will be rounded up and taken away, as if compassion were a crime and coexistence an inconvenience. When the vans arrive to "remove" familiar dogs from schoolyards or hospital compounds, there will be outrage - not because people love chaos, but because they have learned to live responsibly, to care for what is near them. If we continue down this path, we will create a law-and-order problem where none needed to exist, pitting animal caregivers against fearful parents, municipal workers against the very communities they serve. Our already stretched police will be forced to manage conflicts born not of cruelty, but of confusion, conflicts triggered by a disruption of the fragile, decades-old balance that once allowed people and animals to coexist in uneasy but enduring peace. India does not need more division; it needs responsibility. The solution has never been a secret. It lies in a functional, accountable ABC programme on war footing. But that requires the hard, unglamorous work of fixing the system itself. It is easier to command the building of walls than to command the cleaning of the rot within. The Supreme Court, in its anxious search for a quick fix, has managed to do what I thought impossible, it has made the stray dog problem worse. We are not protecting people; we are protecting the system from accountability. Turning public institutions into fortresses will not make India safer, it will only prove how far we have fallen from reason, science, and compassion....