When the State Looked Away, Manavi Rai Stood Her Ground

When animals are pushed to the margins, silence becomes complicity. Manavi Rai has never been comfortable with silence. Whether on the streets during a lockdown, outside courtrooms debating policy, or amid protests against state violence, she has built her life around one principle: animals do not lose their right to live simply because they cannot speak.

Her presence in animal welfare has always been confrontational in the most necessary way. It confronts apathy, confronts convenience, and increasingly, confronts power.

That resolve became visible on a national scale during the COVID-19 lockdowns. As cities shut down and human movement ceased, stray animals were left without food, care, or protection. While institutions struggled to respond, Manavi founded Udgam, an initiative that moved directly onto the streets with food, medical aid, and emergency rescue. What followed was relentless ground work. On average, nearly ninety rescue cases every month, often stretching to twelve a day. Severe injuries, untreated infections, dehydration, abandonment. These were not isolated incidents, but a pattern of systemic neglect.

Over time, her efforts led to a measurable drop in mortality among rescued animals. The rescue of her five-hundredth animal, a critically injured stray dog, became a marker of scale rather than celebration. For Manavi, numbers were never the point. Survival was.

But rescue alone, she has consistently argued, treats symptoms, not causes. That belief pushed her into education and public resistance. Through workshops, she trained hundreds of young people in animal care, hygiene, and emergency response. She built a team of Sevadhars to ensure rescue operations were disciplined, humane, and continuous. She worked with school children, teaching them how coexistence begins at the neighbourhood level.

Her activism took a sharper turn when policy began moving in directions she believed endangered animals further. Manavi became a visible opponent of Supreme Court-ordered stray dog relocation measures, arguing that forced displacement does not resolve overpopulation or public safety concerns. According to her, relocation breaks established territories, increases aggression, leads to starvation, and ultimately results in higher death rates. She has consistently called instead for sterilisation, vaccination, and community-based management.

That stance gained renewed urgency in January 2026, when BBC reported that hundreds of stray dogs were killed across multiple villages in Telangana. According to police confirmations cited by the BBC, at least 354 dogs were killed, with investigations underway across six villages and arrests made, including local council heads. Animal welfare groups stated that the dogs were poisoned or given lethal injections, while authorities acknowledged the killings were illegal and inhumane.

The scale of the killings, rare by Indian standards, triggered nationwide outrage and intensified debate around stray animal management. Manavi joined protests condemning the violence, stating that population control cannot be built on mass killing. She described the Telangana incident as a direct consequence of policy failure, warning that when governance relies on removal and force, cruelty becomes normalised.

For her, the issue is not dogs versus humans, but responsibility versus abandonment. India’s stray animal crisis, she argues, is driven by gaps in sterilisation, poor waste management, abandonment, shrinking habitats, and weak enforcement of existing laws. Killing animals does not resolve these failures. It hides them.

Social media has become one of her tools, not for visibility, but for mobilisation. Manavi documents rescues, shares policy critiques, and urges individuals to act rather than outsource compassion. She is blunt about the reality. Without personal involvement, only a tiny fraction of animals are ever helped. In her estimation, barely two percent of animals in distress reach organised welfare systems.

At the centre of her work lies a clear vision. A world where animals are not treated as disposable. Where rescue, rehabilitation, protection, education, and rehoming are not reactive gestures, but civic responsibilities. Her mission is not limited to saving animals. It is about reshaping how society measures inconvenience versus life.

Manavi Rai does not appear only when outrage peaks. She remains when the cameras leave. In a system that often looks for shortcuts, her work insists on something harder. Presence. Protest. Persistence.

And that insistence has made one thing clear. As long as animals are threatened by neglect or violence, she will be there. On the streets. In the classrooms. Outside the corridors of power. Refusing to look away.