Viksit Bharat vision needs to have room for animals

When you navigate the distance between wood-panelled conference rooms in New Delhi to dusty tehsil offices, one lesson keeps returning to your desk, like a live file: India’s policies are at their best when they reflect our Constitution’s moral imagination, and not merely our administrative convenience.

- KP Krishnan Bharati Ramachandran

When it comes to animals, the moral imagination begins with a simple proposition that our courts and statutes already recognise: Animals are sentient. Law and jurisprudence in India—reading Article 51Ag) of the Indian Constitution alongside the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act and subsequent judgments — acknowledge duties of care towards and the dignity of animals. Once sentience is admitted, indifference is not a policy option; it follows that standards, budgets, supervision and incentives must encode humane treatment as routine governance, not as an afterthought. Viksit Bharat 2047 has to be a truly civilisational project and animals must be brought squarely into the policy tent.

The law is the North Star, but policy must be the road: Indian law has historically classified animals as movable property. Yet our constitutional duties and the Supreme Court's articulation of animal dignity caution against policy approaches that reduce animals to mere property or nuisance.

The direction is, therefore, unambiguous; what remains is to translate that direction into daily practice — how a ward engineer handles a community-dog complaint, how a district budgets for fodder after floods, how a hospital canteen or a government hostel frames procurement standards, or how an inspector reads compliance in a slaughterhouse or a dairy.

Today, the absence of a coherent, cross-government policy lens on animals creates familiar State-capacity problems at the frontline. Municipalities oscillate between ad hoc removals of street animals and sporadic sterilisation; disaster response scrambles for fodder after landfall; agricultural extension systems are silent on humane housing or antibiotic stewardship; tender documents reward the lowest price, and not the most humane standard; urban plan-