V. Sundaram

Captain V. Sundaram (22 April 1916 - 31 May 1997) founded the Blue Cross of India, which grew into one of the largest animal welfare organisations in the country. He came to the work from an unrelated career: he qualified as a pilot in 1935, trained in England, instructed at the Madras Flying Club, trained British and American pilots during the Second World War, joined Tata Airlines in 1945 and flew Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel around India, in several cases with his wife Usha as co-pilot.

The organisation began at home. On a wet day in 1959 he found two pups struggling in floodwater on a street in T. Nagar, Madras, took them in, and started a shelter in a kennel at his own house, with his wife and their three children. He explained the decision by observing that India had many charitable institutions for people and very few for animals. The society was formally registered under the Societies Registration Act in 1964, with nine signatories including Sundaram, Usha Sundaram and their son S. Chinny Krishna, and was recognised by the Animal Welfare Board of India in 1966. Sundaram served on the board's executive committee until 1987.

The organisation's most consequential argument was made almost immediately. Madras had been catching and killing street dogs since 1860 to control rabies; in 1964 Blue Cross proposed instead catching, sterilising and vaccinating them and returning them where they were found. The corporation declined, so Blue Cross began doing it itself, rescuing, spaying and vaccinating dogs and treating animals brought in by residents free of charge. A pilot in south Madras was agreed in 1995 and the corporation abandoned catch-and-kill across the city from September 1996, the start of the animal birth control and anti-rabies programme in India. Human deaths from rabies in Chennai fell from 120 in 1996 to none in 2007, and the city was declared rabies-free in 2010.

Sundaram was awarded the Queen Victoria Medal by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals in 1964, the Watamull Foundation Award in 1987, and the Prani Mitra award posthumously.[2][3][4]