Srinivas Bejjanki
He could have done this quietly. Instead he pointed a phone at it, every day, for years — and turned a one-man feeding route into a public record that a whole town now watches.
If you scroll to the very bottom of his YouTube channel, past two hundred videos, you find a puppy drinking milk in a shelter and a caption in Telugu: “even in the shelter, the same mischief.”
That is the whole channel, really. Not appeals. Not statistics. Just a man showing you what he did today.
Srinivas Bejjanki is a self-employed resident of Bank Colony, Khammam. On 27 January 2021 he and six others registered Jyothi Animal Welfare with the Registrar of Societies, Khammam — Society No. 13 of 2021. He is its President. His wife, Sujamol, is on the executive committee. It is, in the most literal sense, a family and neighbourhood undertaking.
The society's founding memorandum is handwritten. Its stated aims are ambitious for seven people in a district town: animal birth control and anti-rabies programmes for street dogs and cats; training in animal wellbeing; capacity-building for volunteers and veterinary professionals; awareness work to reduce human–animal conflict; and, eventually, shelters and hospitals for animals in need.
Five years later, the shelter is small and the ambition is intact.
The dogs have names. That is not sentimentality — it is a system.
You cannot notice that a dog is limping unless you know what she looks like when she isn't.
Sweety
Filmed for months. Then a video titled “Sweety's kidneys have both failed”. Then, weeks later, one titled “Sweety is gone.” It is the most-watched video on the channel — eleven thousand people in Khammam and beyond sat with the death of a street dog they had come to know.
Bittu
Paralysed. Appears again and again — being fed, being carried, being late for dinner, sitting with his friends. There is no cure coming for Bittu. There is dinner, every evening, and someone who knows his name.
Potti Mummy
A street mother who nursed orphaned puppies that were not hers. When she died, the channel recorded the gap she left — “you can see what's missing without Potti Mummy.” The orphans were still fed.
Two hundred and twenty receipts
Animal welfare in India runs on trust, and trust is exactly what is hardest to establish. Anyone can say they fed a hundred dogs. Srinivas films it — the bowl, the street, the date, the dog.
Over 220 videos now sit on the channel. Most are two to six minutes. Most are in Telugu. They are watched by hundreds to thousands of people each. Taken together they are something rarer than a glossy annual report: a continuous, timestamped, public account of where the work goes.
They also do something he probably did not plan. People in Khammam started recognising the dogs. They started calling when one was hurt. They started asking to sponsor a day's feeding for a birthday, or in memory of a parent — there are videos titled with the names of children whose birthdays paid for that evening's rice, and one for the seventh death anniversary of a woman named Janakamma.
A feeding round became a civic habit.
The unglamorous list
- Cook and load food before the heat comes up
- Drive the route; feed at fixed spots so dogs stop scavenging in bins
- Refill water; drop ice blocks into stone bowls through May and June
- Dress wounds — wire cuts, bite injuries, road accidents, maggot wounds
- Deworming and tick powder for whole litters
- Carry paralysed and terminally ill dogs into shelter care
- Coordinate sterilisation and anti-rabies vaccination for street dogs
- Answer the phone when someone finds a puppy in a drain
- Talk down neighbours who want a litter removed
- Film it, upload it, and answer the comments
A note on scale
Jyothi Animal Welfare is small. There is no fleet, no hospital wing, no corporate partner. What exists is a registered society, a shelter space, a vehicle, a phone that rings, and a person who has not taken a day off in a very long time. Everything on this website is what that adds up to — and what it could become with help.
The people who signed the register
Jyothi Animal Welfare's office bearers, as recorded with the Registrar of Societies, Khammam.
| Name | Role | Occupation |
|---|---|---|
| Bejjanki Srinivas | President | Self-employed |
| Mayathevar Pandiarajan | Vice President | Teacher |
| Madishetti Om Prakash | General Secretary | Self-employed |
| Gundla Ravi Kumar | Joint Secretary | Self-employed |
| Kodam Venu Madhav | Treasurer | Self-employed |
| Bejjanki Sujamol | Executive Member | Homemaker |
| Vooribindi Ravi Kumar | Executive Member | Self-employed |
Source: Society register maintained under Section 3 of the Telangana Societies Registration Act, 2001. See the transparency page for scans of the originals.
Watch it happen, day by day
The channel is the most honest thing about this organisation. Everything else on this site is a summary of it.