Key facts

  • Who: Thenga, an Indian street dog (indie, or desi dog) found as a stray in Dehradun
  • Force: Uttarakhand Police, Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad (BDDS)
  • Year: Trained and inducted in 2019
  • Handlers: Inspector Kamlesh Pant and Ram Dutt Pandey
  • Why it matters: Reported as the first street dog trained and inducted into a police canine squad in India

Most police dogs in India arrive with a pedigree certificate and a price tag running into lakhs of rupees. Thenga arrived underweight, unnamed, and wandering near the police lines in Dehradun. Within a few months of training he was clearing five-foot jumps that some German Shepherds in the same squad couldn’t manage, and by the end of 2019 he’d become the first street dog the Uttarakhand Police had ever put into uniform.

How a Dehradun stray became a police dog

Thenga wasn’t scouted. He was a thin, young stray hanging around the police lines in Dehradun when he caught the attention of Inspector Kamlesh Pant, a handler with the force’s Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad (BDDS). By some accounts it was Pant’s daughter who first brought the pup home; either way, Pant ended up looking after him for about a month before anyone thought to put him through formal training (The Better India; ThePrint).

That training only happened at all because of a wider push inside the force. Inspector General of Police Sanjay Gunjyal had launched a programme in July 2019 to see whether Indian street dogs, indies, as they’re often called, could do the work usually handed to imported German Shepherds, Labradors and Golden Retrievers (VOSD). Thenga, named for the Hindi word for defiance or a cheeky gesture of refusal, became the programme’s first real test case for what an Indian pariah dog or street-raised indie could do on the job.

Thenga’s police dog training: outperforming German Shepherds

Pant and fellow handler Ram Dutt Pandey put Thenga through the same obedience and agility drills as the squad’s pedigree dogs. He was eight months old when ThePrint profiled him in December 2019, described as tall and skinny, with a face that owed more to a Labrador than to anything recognisably desi, plus two extra toes (ThePrint).

A tan street dog leaping over a hurdle on a training ground while a handler in a tracksuit runs alongside holding a red lead.
Thenga clears a hurdle beside his handler during an agility demonstration.

He picked up basic tracking in about 20 days, a skill that takes other breeds months, according to Pant (ThePrint). In the obstacle drills, Pant said Thenga jumped through three hoops for every one a Labrador or German Shepherd cleared, and handled five-foot jumps where the other dogs topped out around four (“Thenga has no difficulty doing five feet,” Pandey told the paper). “We brought him to the training centre as an experiment, but he’s exceeded everyone’s expectations by miles,” Pant said. “He’s performing much better than the other dogs in training” (The Better India).

Gunjyal later said Thenga’s first three months of training produced results encouraging enough to challenge the assumption, baked into Indian policing for decades, that only German Shepherds, Labradors or Golden Retrievers belong in a canine squad (VOSD).

What a street dog does in a police K9 squad

Once training was done, Thenga went to work on explosive and narcotics detection, suspect tracking, and search-and-rescue, the same portfolio handled by the squad’s imported dogs (The Better India). He was also folded into the State Disaster Response Force’s tracking work, going out with a handler to help locate missing people (ThePrint).

A tan street dog in a red collar crouched in a play bow on grass, nose near a red lead.
Thenga during a training session, one of the drills that took him from stray to sniffer squad.

There’s a blunter argument for using dogs like Thenga that has nothing to do with agility scores. Pant pointed out that the electronic detection equipment police would otherwise rely on costs somewhere between 16 and 20 lakh rupees and still only hits about 60% efficiency. Thenga, by contrast, was free (ThePrint). Street dogs also tend to carry stronger natural immunity and cope with the Indian climate better than imported breeds, which the force’s trainers flagged as a real saving on veterinary care over a working dog’s career (VOSD).

India’s first street dog police recruit, and who followed

When the Uttarakhand Police posted a video of Thenga’s training in November 2019, calling him the “pride” of the dog squad and noting that “Indian street dogs perform better than foreign breeds that cost lakhs,” it was widely reported as the first time an Indian police force had formally recruited a street dog into a working canine squad (The Logical Indian; India.com). That’s a slightly different claim from what Delhi had tried five years earlier, when the New Delhi Municipal Council floated putting several hundred vaccinated street dogs to work as general area patrol dogs alongside a public security force. That scheme was about guarding, not detection, and it never involved the kind of sniffer-and-tracker training Thenga went through (Al Jazeera). Thenga’s induction was the first time a street dog had cleared the same bomb-and-narcotics training pipeline as a pedigree K9, within Uttarakhand at least, and whether anyone had quietly done it elsewhere in India first is harder to pin down than the headlines made it sound.

It also wasn’t a one-off. Within a couple of years, West Bengal Police put a rescued mixed-breed named Asha through the same kind of elite bomb-and-drug squad training in Kolkata, and she reportedly became the fastest runner in a 30-dog unit, clearing nearly six feet in hurdle drills (Gulf News). Bengaluru Police ran a similar experiment with rescued strays trained for station duty and crime detection (National Geographic). If you’re weighing up how a native dog measures against the usual working breeds, see how the INDog compares with a Belgian Malinois, a German Shepherd and a Labrador, and read about the ancient history of the pariah dog behind that stamina. None of that happens without Thenga going first and clearing the hoops, literally, that convinced his own handlers he belonged there.

Common questions

Who is Thenga, the Uttarakhand Police dog?

Thenga is an Indian street dog, found as a stray near the police lines in Dehradun, who was adopted and trained by the Uttarakhand Police’s Bomb Detection and Disposal Squad starting in 2019. He became the force’s first street dog recruited into a working canine unit. See How a Dehradun stray became a police dog.

What work does Thenga do for the police?

Thenga was trained for explosive and narcotics detection, suspect tracking, and search-and-rescue, and was also used in tracking work for the State Disaster Response Force to help locate missing people. See What a street dog does in a police K9 squad.

How did Thenga compare to pedigree police dogs like German Shepherds and Labradors?

His handlers said he picked up basic tracking in about 20 days versus months for other breeds, cleared five-foot jumps against roughly four feet for the imported dogs, and generally outperformed them in agility drills during training. See Thenga’s police dog training: outperforming German Shepherds.

Was Thenga the first street dog ever used by an Indian police force?

He’s widely reported as the first street dog formally trained and inducted into a canine detection squad in India, specifically Uttarakhand’s. Delhi had earlier floated using street dogs for general area patrol work in 2014, but that was a guarding scheme, not sniffer-and-tracker training, so it isn’t really the same kind of induction. See India’s first street dog police recruit, and who followed.

Can Indian street dogs be trained as police dogs?

Yes. Thenga’s results in Uttarakhand, along with Asha in Kolkata and rescued strays in Bengaluru, show that street dogs can pass the same detection and tracking training as pedigree breeds. Their handlers cite fast learning, agility and natural resilience to the Indian climate. See Thenga’s police dog training.

Did Thenga’s success lead to other Indian police forces recruiting street dogs?

Yes. West Bengal Police later trained a rescued mixed-breed named Asha for an elite bomb-and-drug squad in Kolkata, and Bengaluru Police ran a comparable programme training rescued strays for station and crime-detection duty. See India’s first street dog police recruit, and who followed.

Sources