Every morning, more than 250 stray dogs gather outside her kitchen in Gurugram. They don’t wander in randomly. They know the routine. They know she’ll be there.
The woman behind this daily ritual grew up in a modest farming family in Bihar, moved to Gurugram looking for a better life, and found one she never quite expected. She works as a schoolteacher and takes home tuitions on the side. Almost every rupee she makes goes toward feeding and caring for street dogs.
It started with one dog.
The Factory Dog That Changed Everything
Years ago, she came across a mother dog who had been trapped inside a locked factory for 14 days. Nobody had gone in to check on her. Nobody had fed her. She got the dog out, and something shifted.
That one rescue didn’t lead to a second one and then a third in any organised, deliberate way. It was more like a door had opened and she couldn’t close it again. The dogs kept coming, and she kept showing up.
She doesn’t run a formal shelter. There’s no NGO behind her, no large team of volunteers, no corporate sponsors. It’s just her, her kitchen, and a commitment she has renewed every single morning for years.
Moving to the Outskirts, Five Times Over
Most people in her position would face an impossible choice: the dogs or the housing. She chose the dogs, five times.
Each time a landlord or a housing situation made it impossible to keep the animals with her, she moved. Eventually she relocated to the outskirts of Gurugram, where the dogs could stay without anyone objecting. The city grew around her even as she moved further from its centre to hold onto the life she had built.
The number of dogs she feeds has grown to over 250.
Doing It While Sick
What makes her story harder to sit with is this: she has been doing all of this while battling severe anaemia. Doctors advised her complete bed rest. She didn’t take it, or couldn’t, or chose not to, depending on how you look at it. The dogs needed to be fed regardless of what a medical report said.
She still wakes up every day and makes sure none of them goes to sleep hungry.
Why This Matters in Gurugram
Gurugram has an estimated 50,000 stray dogs and, as of recent counts, two functional shelters with a combined capacity of about 100 animals. The gap between what the city needs and what it has is enormous, and it is filled, imperfectly and quietly, by people like her.
Individual feeders and rescuers absorb a burden that civic infrastructure hasn’t kept up with. They do it without contracts, without salaries, and usually without recognition. The debate around stray dogs in Indian cities tends to swing between frustration at the animals and frustration at the system. People like her exist in the space in between, making a practical daily choice that doesn’t fit neatly into either camp.
She isn’t trying to solve the problem at scale. She is just making sure that on any given morning, 250 dogs in Gurugram are not hungry. That is the whole of it.
September 7, 2026
