In Siliguri, West Bengal, one woman’s daily commitment to vulnerable animals has grown into a wider mission of rescue, rehabilitation, vaccination, education and humane coexistence. Chandrika Yolmo Lama brings together the discipline of an educator, the compassion of an animal welfare advocate and the determination of a humanitarian.
With an MPhil in Economics and a professional background that includes leadership in educational institutions, she has transformed a personal connection with animals into sustained community action. Today, Chandrika Yolmo Lama is associated with the INDIE RTR Rescue Treatment Release Centre, the “Rabies Free Society” mission and campaigns encouraging responsible coexistence between people and animals.
By Imperium Times Editorial Desk
Source: Imperium Times
Chandrika Yolmo Lama: A Life Where Education Meets Compassion
For Chandrika Yolmo Lama, service has never been confined to one professional identity. Her journey began in education, where she served as a teacher, lecturer and principal, but her relationship with animal welfare gradually became a defining part of her life.
Her academic foundation includes an MPhil in Economics, B.Ed., NTT and DSE. Her professional journey took her through Army-affiliated and civilian educational institutions, including Army schools and GD Goenka School in Aligarh. The experience of guiding young people gave her an understanding of the power of education to shape attitudes and behaviour.
That same belief now informs her work with animals. Chandrika Yolmo Lama approaches animal welfare not simply as rescue, but as an opportunity to create awareness, responsibility and more compassionate communities.
Her story demonstrates how professional experience can evolve into a larger social purpose when compassion is translated into consistent action.
From a Family Posting in Hisar to a Lifelong Bond With Animals
The connection between Chandrika Yolmo Lama and animal welfare began nearly two decades ago during her family’s Army posting in Hisar, Haryana.
Adopting a stray dog during that period became an important turning point. What initially emerged as an act of care gradually developed into a sustained commitment to animals encountered in different parts of the country.
As her family moved between locations, she continued noticing stray animals that needed food, shelter, treatment and protection. Small acts of kindness gradually became a personal responsibility.
The journey also involved remarkable efforts to keep rescued animals with her during relocations. Her travels with adopted dogs became part of a larger story of commitment: animals were not treated as temporary responsibilities but as lives deserving continuity, care and dignity.
That philosophy eventually found a permanent expression in Siliguri, where Chandrika Yolmo Lama began building a more structured model of care.
INDIE RTR: Rescue, Treatment and Release With Dignity
The creation of INDIE RTR Rescue Treatment Release Centre in Siliguri gave Chandrika Yolmo Lama a structured platform for her animal welfare mission.
The name itself captures the operating philosophy: Rescue, Treatment and Release.
The objective is not simply to remove an animal from the street. Sick, injured, abandoned and vulnerable animals can receive treatment and care before being returned to their locations when they have recovered.
This approach places rehabilitation alongside rescue.
Chandrika Yolmo Lama has also built a routine around daily feeding and care. Her work has involved caring for more than 70 stray dogs every day, while another profile places the broader number of stray animals cared for daily at more than 80.
For Chandrika Yolmo Lama, the numbers matter, but the consistency matters even more. Daily animal welfare requires time, resources, organisation and emotional commitment.
For Chandrika Yolmo Lama, compassion becomes meaningful through repetition: feeding another animal, responding to another injury, arranging another treatment and ensuring another rescued dog has a chance to recover.
A Morning Mission That Turns Compassion Into Action
The daily routine associated with Chandrika Yolmo Lama begins early, reflecting how seriously she treats community animal care.
Her morning rounds have involved walking several kilometres while carrying food, medicines and other essentials for stray animals. These rounds allow her to identify animals that are hungry, injured or unwell and respond before problems become more severe.
This model of animal welfare is deeply local.
It is not limited to occasional campaigns or special events. It is built around knowing the animals in a community and responding to their everyday needs.
Chandrika Yolmo Lama’s approach also demonstrates why individual action can become socially meaningful when sustained over time.
A single meal may help one animal for one day. Consistent care can create a safer environment for an entire community of animals.
Chandrika Yolmo Lama and the Mission for a Rabies-Free Society
One of the most important additions to Chandrika Yolmo Lama’s work is her mission for a “Rabies Free Society,” initiated in 2024.
The mission connects animal welfare with public awareness and community safety. Its focus is not only on compassion toward animals, but also on vaccination and responsible coexistence.
So far, Chandrika Yolmo Lama has vaccinated 330 community dogs using her own resources, according to the information supplied for this feature. This expands the vaccination milestone beyond the 300-plus figure reflected in the supporting profiles.
A rabies-free society requires awareness, vaccination, responsible animal care and informed community participation, priorities that Chandrika Yolmo Lama brings together through her mission.
The objective of Chandrika Yolmo Lama’s initiative is clear: build greater awareness around rabies prevention while encouraging people to understand that protecting animals and protecting communities can be interconnected responsibilities.
The mission is therefore not simply about treating individual animals. It is about creating a culture in which prevention, awareness and humane care become part of everyday community life.
Vaccination as a Bridge Between Animal Welfare and Public Responsibility
The vaccination work associated with Chandrika Yolmo Lama adds an important dimension to the conversation around stray animals.
Animal welfare is sometimes discussed primarily in terms of food, shelter and rescue. Vaccination introduces another layer: prevention.
By vaccinating community dogs, awareness can move from reacting to illness toward reducing preventable risk.
The “Rabies Free Society” mission therefore carries a dual purpose. It seeks to improve the wellbeing of animals while encouraging safer coexistence between animals and people.
For Chandrika Yolmo Lama, this is part of a wider belief that humanitarian values should include responsible care for living beings.
The mission also demonstrates how individual resources can be directed toward a public-facing cause.
Her decision to fund vaccinations from her own resources underscores the personal commitment behind the initiative.
Innovation Meets Compassion Through QR-Coded Collars
Chandrika Yolmo Lama’s work is also notable for bringing technology into grassroots animal care.
She introduced a QR-coded collar system for rescued animals, allowing important information about an animal’s medical history and care to be connected with its identification.
This innovation addresses a practical challenge in rescue work: maintaining continuity of information.
When an animal moves through rescue, treatment and rehabilitation, records can become important for understanding its medical needs and history.
The QR-coded collar concept offers a simple bridge between physical identification and digital information.
For Chandrika Yolmo Lama, technology is not an end in itself. It is a tool that can make compassionate work more organised, traceable and effective.
This combination of empathy and innovation gives her animal welfare model a distinctive character.
Taking Animal Welfare Beyond the Streets of Siliguri
Chandrika Yolmo Lama has also used travel and public awareness as tools for advocacy.
Supporting information documents long-distance awareness journeys covering thousands of kilometres, including journeys involving rescued and adopted dogs.
One reported journey covered approximately 2,300 kilometres from Lucknow to Goa, while another covered around 3,000 kilometres from Goa to Siliguri with adopted dogs.
These journeys were more than personal travel. They became opportunities to draw attention to adoption, vaccination, animal welfare and responsible pet ownership.
The message was particularly relevant to Indian and indigenous dogs: compassion should not depend on pedigree, appearance or commercial value.
Through her work, Chandrika Yolmo Lama has encouraged a broader understanding of adoption and the value of giving rescued dogs a safe and loving home.
“Adopt a Desi Dog” and a Culture of Responsible Coexistence
The “Adopt a Desi Dog” campaign represents another dimension of Chandrika Yolmo Lama’s advocacy.
The campaign encourages people to reconsider how Indian breeds are perceived and to recognise adoption as a meaningful way of giving abandoned and rescued animals another opportunity.
The message is broader than a campaign slogan.
It challenges the assumption that responsible pet ownership must be linked to pedigree preferences.
It also creates space for Indian dogs to be recognised for companionship, loyalty and individuality.
For Chandrika Yolmo Lama, responsible coexistence begins with changing attitudes.
For Chandrika Yolmo Lama, that is where awareness can become a foundation for long-term change.
When communities understand animals differently, they may also become more willing to support vaccination, humane treatment, adoption and rehabilitation.
That is where awareness can become a foundation for long-term change.
Supporting the Voiceless Through Everyday Service
The work of Chandrika Yolmo Lama is ultimately built around animals that cannot advocate for themselves.
An injured street dog cannot explain its pain.
A sick animal cannot request treatment.
An abandoned dog cannot negotiate for shelter.
The responsibility therefore falls on people who are willing to notice and act.
Her work has centred on precisely that principle.
The supplied profile describes more than 200 dogs rescued, treated and rehabilitated, while Chandrika Yolmo Lama’s daily mission continues to support community animals across Siliguri.
Each rescue can involve a different challenge, but the underlying response remains consistent: identify the need, provide care and work toward recovery and responsible release.
For Chandrika Yolmo Lama, this is what turns compassion into a system of action.
Education Remains at the Heart of Her Advocacy
Although animal welfare now occupies a major part of her public mission, Chandrika Yolmo Lama’s identity as an educator remains important.
Her years in education taught her that lasting change requires more than information. It requires people to understand why an issue matters and how their own actions can contribute to better outcomes.
That lesson is visible in her approach to animal awareness.
Rescue alone cannot solve every problem.
Communities also need to understand vaccination, responsible pet ownership, adoption, humane treatment and coexistence.
Chandrika Yolmo Lama therefore represents a bridge between education and activism.
Her classroom experience helped develop her communication skills, while animal welfare gave those skills a new field of application.
The result is an advocacy model associated with Chandrika Yolmo Lama that is based on both action and awareness.
Recognition for a Journey Driven by Purpose
The public profile of Chandrika Yolmo Lama has also grown through recognition.
She was named Winner of Indie Royal Mrs. India Classic 2019 and was recognised as a Super Woman 2025 title achiever by Forever Star India.
The supplied magazine material also presents her as an educator, animal welfare advocate and humanitarian, highlighting her work with rescued animals, her educational background and her daily commitment to care.
Such recognition provides visibility, but the central story remains her service.
A title cannot feed an animal.
An award cannot vaccinate a community dog.
A magazine feature cannot replace the daily work of rescue and treatment.
For Chandrika Yolmo Lama, recognition can instead become another platform through which awareness reaches people who may not otherwise encounter the cause.
A Broader Vision: Human and Animal Coexistence
Chandrika Yolmo Lama’s vision connects animal welfare with community responsibility.
Her stated goal is a Rabies Free Society in which humans and animals can coexist peacefully.
Chandrika Yolmo Lama’s vision connects animal welfare with community responsibility.
Peaceful coexistence requires people to understand animals, communities to support humane practices and preventive measures to be taken seriously.
It also requires compassion to become practical.
Feeding, vaccination, treatment, identification, adoption and responsible care are individual actions, but together they can contribute to a more humane environment.
The work of Chandrika Yolmo Lama shows how a local mission can be built around this larger principle.
From Educator to Humanitarian: A Journey Still Evolving
The professional evolution of Chandrika Yolmo Lama is striking because it does not represent a complete departure from her earlier life.
Instead, her experiences have accumulated.
Education taught her the value of awareness.
Leadership taught her responsibility.
Animal rescue taught her compassion in action.
Technology gave her new tools for organising care.
Public advocacy expanded the conversation beyond individual cases.
Together, these experiences have shaped a humanitarian journey that continues to develop.
Chandrika Yolmo Lama has shown that social impact does not always begin with a large institution or a formal organisation.
Sometimes it begins with noticing one animal that needs help and deciding not to walk away.
Editorial Perspective: Compassion Becomes Powerful When It Becomes Consistent
The story of Chandrika Yolmo Lama is ultimately a story about consistency.
It is easy to speak about compassion.
It is harder to wake up early, walk several kilometres, carry food and medicines, respond to injured animals, arrange treatment and continue doing it day after day.
It is easy to support animal welfare in principle.
It is harder to personally fund vaccinations and take responsibility for community animals.
It is easy to call for awareness.
It is harder to travel thousands of kilometres to carry that message with you.
That is why the journey of Chandrika Yolmo Lama carries a wider lesson.
Humanitarian service can take many forms. It can exist in classrooms, on streets, inside rescue centres and within communities.
Her mission for a Rabies Free Society adds a preventive dimension to that service, while her rescue and rehabilitation work gives it a deeply human foundation.
Her work also reinforces a simple idea: animals may be voiceless, but their wellbeing is not without value.
As Chandrika Yolmo Lama continues her work in Siliguri, her vision remains focused on a future where compassion is practiced rather than merely discussed, where vaccination and awareness help create safer communities, and where humans and animals can share the same spaces with greater dignity and understanding.
Frequently Asked Questions About Chandrika Yolmo Lama
Who is Chandrika Yolmo Lama?
Chandrika Yolmo Lama is an educator, animal welfare advocate and humanitarian based in Siliguri, West Bengal. She is associated with the INDIE RTR Rescue Treatment Release Centre and the “Rabies Free Society” mission.
What is Chandrika Yolmo Lama’s educational background?
She holds an MPhil in Economics along with B.Ed., NTT and DSE qualifications and has served as a teacher, lecturer and principal in educational institutions.
What is the Rabies Free Society mission?
The Rabies Free Society mission, initiated in 2024, focuses on vaccination, awareness and responsible coexistence between humans and animals.
How many community dogs has Chandrika Yolmo Lama vaccinated?
According to the information supplied for this feature, Chandrika Yolmo Lama has vaccinated 330 community dogs using her own resources.
How many stray animals does she care for?
Her daily work has involved caring for more than 70 stray dogs, while supporting profiles describe care for more than 80 stray animals daily.
What is INDIE RTR?
INDIE RTR stands for Rescue, Treatment and Release. The centre in Siliguri provides care for sick, injured, abandoned and vulnerable street animals, with the aim of treating and rehabilitating them.
What innovation has Chandrika Yolmo Lama introduced?
She has introduced QR-coded collars for rescued animals, connecting identification with information such as medical history and care details.
What is the Adopt a Desi Dog campaign?
The campaign promotes adoption of Indian and indigenous dogs and encourages responsible pet ownership without limiting compassion to pedigree breeds.
What is the larger vision behind her work?
Her broader mission is to promote a Rabies Free Society and peaceful coexistence between humans and animals through rescue, vaccination, awareness, responsible care and compassion.
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