Mrs. Hansa Roy is a retired geoscientist who has given the past eighteen years of her life, time, emotions, efforts and own money to the service of stray dogs in the city of Baroda. She believes there is no greater joy than dirtying your own hands for the cause and stays miles off social media. In her eighteen years of selfless service on the roads, she has been able to touch more than three thousand canine lives (all sterilised and vaccinated against rabies) on the streets who have been and are being cared for their entire lifetime. In the absence of public participation, she has combed locations in different areas ever since 2005, befriended stray dogs through feeding and ensured to get them sterilised and vaccinated against rabies. Single handed, she has managed to attain 100% sterilisation with no incidence of rabies ever in any of her dogs under her care. In these eighteen years, she has filed more than hundred police cases and have provided guidance to others too. She attends Court hearings related to the animal cruelty cases filed by her.

Presently, she travels round about fifty kilometres everyday tending to an average three hundred stray dogs at different locations across Baroda, who are under her lifetime care. Each of her children, that is what she prefers to calls them, have a name they identify themselves with and a compelling heroic story of their own. They await her, to be fed one nutritious meal in a clean bowl, have their medical needs looked after and get the love and dignity they so deserve. She is a daily constant in their otherwise unpredictable life.

With poor facility for animal birth control in Baroda at present, she struggles to get the stray dogs sterilised. She envisions a rabies free Baroda where fellow human beings learn to live in harmony and symbiotic relationship with stray dogs.

Dr. Kuhu Roy is a practicing nutritionist with a passion in the area of metabolic dysfunction associated steatotic liver disease and other lifestyle disorders. When streets get too cold and cruel for survival for the senior stray dogs under her care, she adopts them and those with special needs; blind, paralysed, amputees. She believes this marginalised segment of stray dogs is as worthy of love and a home. She believes in turning them into joyous overgrown pups with frosted faces in their twilight period and labels them as her jewels.

Born out of her grief of having seen countless painful deaths in the past eighteen years of her service to stray dogs, some losses being very gruesome, the death due to negligence of her dog boss named Butter as the final nail in the coffin, she took up on the taboo and made it her mission to normalise the conversation around loss of companion animals in India. A first in India, she runs and moderates the support groups for the bereaved parents of companion animals since 2021. She proudly states that her children on three and four legs put her on the trajectory to become India’s first pet loss grief specialist.

She finds writing very cathartic and pens about her jewels with the hope that the beauty and the plight of stray dogs would be heard someday.

Along with Mrs. Roy, she has co-authored Can a stray dog become man’s best friend? 5 steps to harmonious living with stray dogs decoding the Animal Birth Control (ABC) programme to create awareness regarding spay and neuter. She believes that ABC is the only means to strive for man-stray dog harmony and has been requesting the Government to digitalise the scientific programme for accountability and transparency, regardless of the recently notified Animal Birth Control Rules, 2023.

The duo share their home with Kaanu, Natasha, Baldev, Chhutki, Zenobia, Ghoplu, Jammy, Junior, Bada Kaan and Mohini.

Check out the news clips that have featured them

• Coronavirus: ‘Who will feed the stray animals?’ Community carers worry about curbs on movement
• Mother-daughter duo helps people cope with depression due to loss of pets
• Early signs of a violent mindset
• Missing dog bone of contention between activist, company officials in Vadodara
• Stray dog sterilisation: Woman takes on residents
• On mercy to animals, let’s follow our texts
• Depressed after pet’s death? This Vadodara duo will lend healing touch
• The grief with no name
• Vadodara: Sarpanch faces heat for chopping off 9 neem trees
• I’m old, but I’m gold
• Helping Street Dogs