In a meeting of the House today, councillors said that even though every year a large amount of money was spent on catching stray animals, there has been no visible improvement in this direction. Councillor Mahesh Chander Sharma said that ever since work had been decentralised, less strays were being caught.

Duggal said that the MCD had caught 12,909 strays between April 1 to December 15 this year. Duggal said that earlier they used to house the stray cattle in MCD sheds. If their owners did not rescue them and pay the fine within a week, these would be auctioned. Now they have changed their policy and send these stray cattles to dairies for which land was allotted to non-governmental agencies outside Delhi. He said that they decided to do so primarily because they do not have space to house so many cattle.

But he admitted that the menace of monkeys had grown because they had just one contractor to catch them. He said that whenever they received a complaint they asked the contractor to come in. Since no one came forward for the job despite advertisements in the newspapers, they had fixed a flat rate of Rs 150 for every monkey caught by the contractor. These monkeys were caught and then released in jungles outside Delhi in the presence of MCD employees.