New Delhi: Seventeen cats in Juhu, seven in Worli, six around Churchgate, and plenty more scattered across Mumbai. This new website, Meowmbai, is helping people find out where the felines hang out.
Twenty-five-year-old Sudarshan Birla has mapped cat sightings across the city for anyone hoping to bump into a familiar whiskered face, become a cat’s chosen guest, or simply earn a few scratches behind the ears.
Birla, an IIT Guwahati civil engineering graduate, made the website in two weeks with one aim: to create a cat archive. He did not want to create another Instagram page.
“I wanted to make it more useful and interactive. I wanted to create something where people could see cats mapped to specific locations and explore them geographically,” he said over the phone.
Better than Instagram posts
After moving from one area to another in Mumbai, Birla started his cat-documenting mission from Malad, where he currently stays. A product manager by day, a filmmaker by passion, and a cat lover by choice, Birla has always loved clicking cat photos. In fact, the first 25 photos were uploaded from his personal album. He was uploading photos on Instagram, and he even saw his friends doing the same. That’s when the idea struck him: “What if all these sightings could be documented together in one place?”
Meowmbai is not a personal space; Birla created a platform where users can upload photos of spotted cats by marking them on a map.
When he shared the website link on X Monday morning, there were 117 cats; by evening, 188 cats had been mapped across 24 locations.
“I was asked why we need a website. Isn’t Instagram uploading enough?” said Birla.
The 25-year-old did not want cats to disappear in stories and endless scrolling. He viewed this platform as a collection rather than a feed.
The website offers an “Explore” option, which is like a community alert feature where users can report if a cat appears injured or needs urgent attention. For example, details of a cat with an eye injury were uploaded by a user, as seen on the website by ThePrint.
“In the future, the platform could become more useful. If someone wants to adopt a stray cat or help an injured one, they could use the platform to identify the animal and connect with the right people. Imagine spotting a cat with a fractured leg in a neighbourhood. As a newcomer, you may not know which NGO or veterinarian to contact. The platform could eventually help connect users to organisations and vets who can assist,” he said.
The website only asks for emergency contact information. Birla, who graduated in 2023, emphasises that he does not collect unnecessary user data. Users have the freedom to add their location manually; otherwise, it can be extracted from the image metadata.
“Most smartphone photographs already contain location data, so users can verify that information themselves through their photo galleries,” he added.
Future plans: Adoptions, animal welfare
Meowmbai is perhaps India’s first website mapping cat locations. However, in India, a few cat enthusiasts have already Google-pinned locations of famous cats. In Bengaluru, street cats are turned into celebrities, with their locations geotagged on Google Maps. The most famous is the Indiranagar metro station cat.
Birla does not have a cat, but he wants to contribute to the welfare of cats in Mumbai. For now, he sees it as a “fun activity,” but his larger vision is to build features around adoption, animal welfare, and connecting people with NGOs so that cats get help when needed.
Birla is already speaking to pet cafes, pet stores and businesses that operate in the pet-care space. For the future, Birla plans to add educational content for cat owners—guidance on cat care, health and responsible pet parenting.
Meowmbai has an adoption-related feature, but Birla wants to improve it by creating more resources for cat parents.
Even though Meowmbai has just started, Birla has already received feedback to make a similar map for dogs.
“I am working on implementing it, but not under Meowmbai, since the name doesn’t fit,” he said.
(Edited by Prashant Dixit)
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