Chinny Krishna

Krishna was born in 1945 to Captain V. Sundaram and Usha Sundaram, who was India's first woman pilot. He took a BTech and MTech in chemical engineering from the University of Madras and a master's degree in business administration from Bucknell University in the United States.

In 1959, at the age of about fifteen, Krishna was one of four founders of the Animal Aid Association in Madras, two of the others being his parents. The association was reconstituted as the Blue Cross of India, registered as a society in 1964, and grew into one of India's largest animal welfare organisations. He served as its chairman and is chairman emeritus.

From 1965 he argued for sterilisation rather than culling as a humane way of managing street dog populations, and developed what became the Animal Birth Control–Anti Rabies programme. The Animal Welfare Board of India adopted the approach, and the Animal Birth Control (Dogs) Rules of 2001 made the killing of street dogs unlawful in India.

Krishna was vice chairman of the Animal Welfare Board of India for two terms, from 2000 to 2016. In 2007 he was one of seven animal advocates who founded the Federation of Indian Animal Protection Organisations, alongside Norma Alvares of People for Animals Goa, Amala Akkineni of Blue Cross of Hyderabad, Shiela Rao of CUPA Bangalore, Abodh Aras of Welfare of Stray Dogs, Nandita Shah of SHARAN and Erika Abrams of Animal Aid Charitable Trust. He remains its chairman emeritus.

In business he founded Aspick Engineering in 1974, which built dish antennae used in India's Satellite Instructional Television Experiment. Among his other animal-related projects are Compufrog, computer software developed as a replacement for animal dissection in schools, and an early animal-free tennis racquet string.

Krishna received the Jeev Daya Puraskar in 2001 and an award from Humane Society International in 2005. In 2021 the Animal Welfare Board of India gave him a special Prani Mitra lifetime animal service award; his father had received the Prani Mitra award in 1998, making them the first father and son to be honoured with it. FIAPO describes him as the grand old man of animal welfare in India.[2][3][4][5]