July 7, 2026
Ep 672: How Mumbai’s Feline Foundation Is Systematically Tackling a Million-Cat City with Pallavi Kamath, Executive Director of The Feline Foundation, Mumbai, India
“The more I work in this field, the more there is to learn — and there’s multiple strategies that you have to implement.”
Pallavi Kamath grew up fostering kittens in Mumbai, studied animal science at UC Davis, earned a master’s in animal public policy, and returned home to lead The Feline Foundation — an NGO she describes as the first in Maharashtra to systematically address the needs of community cats. With an estimated one million cats on Mumbai’s streets and no existing population data to work from, the Foundation built its entire approach around a Logical Framework Matrix: a structured problem tree that mapped every welfare challenge and converted each into a program goal, giving the organization three focused pillars — population management, healthcare, and community involvement.
On the ground, that means zone-by-zone sterilization across Andheri West, Mumbai’s largest suburb. The Foundation divides the area into zones, conducts exhaustive street-by-street cat censuses, organizes local feeders into “carer collectives,” and sets monthly TNR targets before returning to repeat the census. Once a zone hits 80% sterilized, it moves into maintenance mode — with community members taking the lead. Six of their 12 zones have crossed that threshold.
Pallavi and Stacy also dig into the logistical realities most programs never face: nearly zero access to commercial traps, a handful of expert cat catchers who learned entirely on the job, and a city so geographically dense that sterilizing one neighborhood means immediately contending with cats flowing in from the next. The conversation closes on scalability — how a cat cafe can seed community buy-in, why Mumbai’s municipal government is a rare progressive funding partner, and what it would take to open additional centers across a city that still has nowhere near enough sterilization resources.
- How a Logical Framework Matrix turns a problem tree into an organizational blueprint
- The zone-by-zone census methodology: every street, every building, every shopkeeper — before TNR begins
- What a “carer collective” is and why organizing local feeders before you start trapping changes everything
- The 80% threshold: how the Foundation defines population stability and transitions to maintenance mode
- The reality of trap access in India — and how a visit from an international colleague transformed the team’s efficiency
- Why Mumbai’s dog sterilization history may have contributed to a massive cat population explosion
- How a cat cafe can function as an adoption engine and community awareness hub
- Why Mumbai’s municipal government is one of the few in India providing grants for cat sterilization — and why it’s still not enough
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