India worships the cow as sacred, yet millions of cattle wander its highways, city streets and garbage dumps after being abandoned by their owners. As thousands of people die in animal-related road accidents every year, the Supreme Court has now confronted a question that extends beyond law into the nation’s moral conscience: Can a society claim to protect an animal while abandoning it once its economic value disappears?
Every day, on highways stretching across the country and on crowded city roads, a familiar scene unfolds. Cattle saunter through speeding traffic, squat at busy intersections, graze along railway tracks and forage through mountains of garbage. For most Indians, the sight has become so commonplace that it scarcely attracts notice.
Yet, behind this ordinary image lies an extraordinary contradiction.
Every year, thousands of road accidents are linked to stray animals, particularly cattle and dogs, claiming human lives while also silently killing the very animals that society professes to revere.
Conservative estimates based on highway accident records and judicial proceedings suggest that between 1,200 and 1,500 people die annually in collisions involving animals on national highways alone. Those figures almost certainly understate the true scale of the problem since countless accidents on state highways, village roads and urban streets go unrecorded or are never categorised as animal-related incidents.
The animals themselves are victims of an equally unforgiving system. Most are not born on the streets. They begin life as someone’s property—reared for milk, breeding or agricultural labour. But once their economic utility declines, many are quietly abandoned, left to survive amid speeding traffic, overflowing garbage dumps and railway tracks.
In that sense, India stands almost alone. Few countries have normalised the presence of large livestock on public roads to the extent that India has, and fewer still reconcile that reality with a cultural tradition that accords those same animals the highest degree of reverence.
The contradiction is reflected even in official records. India’s livestock census has long recognised “stray cattle” as a distinct category, defining them as animals that were once owned, but later abandoned. The 20th Livestock Census recorded more than 5.02 million stray cattle nationwide, a marginal decline from 2012, but still one of the largest abandoned livestock populations anywhere in the world.
It is this paradox that recently came under judicial scrutiny in Nisha vs Municipal Council, Sangrur, where the Supreme Court transformed what began as a road safety case into a broader examination of society’s responsibilities.
Hearing the matter, the bench of Justices Sanjay Karol and N Kotiswar Singh observed: “We have already touched upon the issue of animals being let go as their utility dwindled… we live in a deeply flawed, human world.”
The bench went further, bluntly identifying the contradiction that lies at the heart of the issue. “Society abandons animals when they cease to be useful, allows them to roam freely without concern for their safety, and yet reacts with outrage when those same animals are used for food,” it said.
Few recent judicial observations have so sharply exposed the distance between public sentiment and public responsibility.
The bench emphasised that most cattle roaming India’s roads are not genuinely “stray”. They are owned animals that became economic liabilities. While recognising the financial burdens faced by farmers and dairy owners, the Court left little room for ambiguity.
“Abandonment is not an option.” Those who rear animals, it held, remain responsible for their care throughout their lives or must arrange for their transfer to authorised shelters.
The judgment reinforces constitutional values embedded in Article 21, guaranteeing the right to life, and Article 48, which directs the State to organise animal husbandry on modern and scientific principles. It also builds upon the landmark decision in Animal Welfare Board of India vs A Nagaraja (2014), where the Supreme Court recognised that animals possess an intrinsic right to live with dignity.
The decision is consistent with a broader pattern in Indian jurisprudence.
Earlier, the Supreme Court rejected indiscriminate culling of stray dogs and instead mandated humane and scientific population control. High Courts in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh have repeatedly treated accidents caused by stray cattle as failures of governance, awarding compensation to victims while emphasising the state’s obligation to maintain safe public spaces.
Across these rulings, one principle remains constant: animals do not become stray by accident. They become stray because human beings abandon them, and because public institutions fail to prevent that abandonment from becoming a threat to both animals and citizens.
Judicial concern has also been informed by disturbing statistics. The Supreme Court has noted that deaths arising from animal-related incidents increased from 1,130 in 2018 to 1,425 in 2019 before declining slightly to 1,305 in 2020—figures that nonetheless reveal a persistent national problem. In Madhya Pradesh alone, authorities recorded 237 major accidents involving stray animals over a two-year period, causing 94 deaths and injuring another 133 people.
These numbers exist within India’s already grim road safety landscape, where more than 4.6 lakh accidents and over 1.75 lakh fatalities occur every year. Although stray-animal collisions constitute only one part of that crisis, they represent one of its most preventable causes.
The animals pay an equally devastating price. Thousands are struck by speeding vehicles every year, while railway records document tens of thousands of cattle run-over incidents over time. Many survive only to die slowly after ingesting plastic waste from garbage dumps. Wandering herds destroy standing crops, create sanitation hazards and increasingly disrupt urban life. What was once viewed as a rural issue has become a nationwide governance challenge.
Understanding this crisis requires looking beyond the courtroom.
For millions of Indians, the cow occupies a unique spiritual and cultural position—as Kamdhenu, the divine provider, and as a symbol of abundance, compassion and purity. These beliefs have profoundly shaped public policy. Cow protection movements have drawn legitimacy from this tradition, while successive legislative measures restricting cattle slaughter and trade have reinforced legal protection.
Yet, those same policies have also produced unintended consequences.
When ageing or non-productive cattle can no longer be sold or economically maintained, many owners face an impossible financial burden. Without adequate shelters, incentives or rehabilitation mechanisms, abandonment often becomes the default response.
The result is a system in which legal protection ends where economic responsibility begins.
The Supreme Court’s intervention, therefore, reaches well beyond the immediate issue of road accidents. It raises a far more uncomfortable question. Who bears responsibility for an animal after it ceases to generate income?
Can a society genuinely claim to honour the cow while allowing it to wander highways, feed on plastic waste and die beneath speeding vehicles?
Can protection remain meaningful if it exists only in law and symbolism, but not in everyday care?
The judgment in Nisha vs Municipal Council, Sangrur ultimately serves as more than a legal pronouncement. It is a mirror held up to Indian society.
Until ownership extends beyond utility, and reverence is matched by lifelong responsibility, India’s roads will continue to narrate a quiet but disturbing story—of animals worshipped in principle, protected in rhetoric, and abandoned in practice.
—The writer is a New Delhi-based journalist, lawyer and trained mediator
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