Namma Indies
Built with Aswin R. Bengaluru, since July 2026. nammaindies.org
Namma is Kannada for “ours”. Indies are India’s street dogs: tens of millions of them, on our streets, outside our shops, curled up in our neighbourhoods, and almost none of them ever counted. Namma Indies is an open, community-built atlas of them. The idea is that someone on every street already knows which dog limps, which one just had puppies, which one waits by the tea stall every evening, and that knowledge should have somewhere to go.
Why count
Ask how many dogs live on your road and nobody can answer: not the municipality, not the vet, not the NGO that vaccinated your lane last monsoon. Every intervention for street dogs, from sterilisation to rabies vaccination, is a ratio, and the denominator has never existed. Belsare and Vanak (2020) show why management programmes can’t succeed without it.
The IndieDex
The app is a field journal for street dogs, on the web and as native iOS and Android apps. You photograph a dog and it notes where and when by itself; you can add a line (“friendly”, “sleeps by the shop”), sex, whether an ear has been notched after sterilisation, and condition. A short video works better still: its frames become one multi-view sighting.
Every sighting is filed against an individual that starts out empty. A detector finds the dog, a re-identification model embeds it, and the app looks for the same dog among nearby sightings, then proposes a ranked shortlist. A person always decides. Honestly measured, the right dog comes first 37% of the time with one earlier photo of it, and 83% with eight, and look-alikes can outscore true matches, so the system never asserts one on its own. A confirmed match makes the dog an individual with a history.
Open code, careful data
The code is open source under the MIT licence. The data is not, because a map that pins a particular dog to a particular street is useful to someone who means it harm. Your own sightings show exactly; everyone else’s show as a rough area, photos are stripped of location metadata, and anything public will be aggregate.
Next
Naming (a name is a claim of relationship, so it needs rules for who may give one), population estimates with honest confidence intervals, a public view that never reveals where a named dog reliably is, and contributions over WhatsApp.
Built with Dognosis and Soulmates. Open the IndieDex, or follow along on Instagram and X.