The deadliest wildlife conflict in India is being treated as a medical problem

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05-05-2025

L ate one night in September last year, Sunita Prajapati's aged mother woke her up, complaining that she had felt something bite her. After a quick shake-out of the bedding where her mother and eight-year-old son slept together, Prajapati assured her that she had found nothing to worry about.
About five hours later, her son woke her up, saying he felt the urge to vomit. As Prajapati tended to him, her mother complained that she was finding it difficult to breathe. Prajapati decided to take her to one hospital, while relatives took her son to a different one to get him medicine for what seemed to be a stomach upset.
That was the last time Prajapati saw her son alive.
At the hospital, doctors found marks on Prajapati's mother's thigh that resembled a bite from a pair of fangs. 'The doctor said it could be a snakebite. They took my mother on a trolley and asked me to wait outside. I knew then that she would not survive,' Prajapati told Scroll in her home in Madhya Pradesh's Gwalior, breaking down in tears.
Shortly after, she heard the news that her son too, had passed away. Doctors certified his death also as having occurred from snakebite.
'I had just lost my husband the previous month to illness. And then, in a single day, I lost my son and my mother,' Prajapati said.
On learning of the symptoms that the victims had suffered, Vivek Verma, a snake rescuer who helps the forest department during rescue calls in and around Gwalior, suggested that they could have been bitten by a common krait.
The common krait is one of the 'big four' species of snakes in India whose venom is deadly to humans. The others are the Indian cobra, Russell's viper, and saw-scaled viper – all of which are also found in Madhya Pradesh. Including these four, India is home to 310 species of snakes, of which 66 are venomous – but the big four alone account for approximately 90% of snakebite incidents.
That means these four species are responsible for a massive proportion of snakebite deaths in the world, given that India accounts for half of global snakebite deaths. A 2020 study estimated that between 2000 and 2019, India had 1.2 million snakebite deaths, averaging to 58,000 a year. Almost 70% of these, the study found, occurred in nine 'high burden states', which included Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand.
A 2024 study gave an overview of snakebite deaths in Madhya Pradesh, based on compensation that the state provided to families of snakebite death victims. The study found that more than 5,700 people died of snakebite between 2020 and 2022. The study warned that the actual number was likely higher, since cases where people did not apply for compensation were not counted.
The only treatment for snakebite is anti-snake-venom, or ASV, which must be administered as quickly as possible. 'The time that the patient takes between the bite and coming to the hospital to get the anti-snake-venom is crucial,' a doctor in a civil hospital in Gwalior said, asking not to be identified by name. He added that often these delays happen because people first take the victim to quacks, and also at times because victims do not realise that they have been bitten by a snake till the symptoms show up. 'Then the only option we have apart from administering the ASV is to treat the symptoms that the venom has caused, like regulating the blood pressure,' the doctor said.
Indeed, making anti-snake-venom more widely available has long been the primary focus of most government efforts to tackle the problem of snakebites.
But wildlife experts point out that by working only towards this goal, government authorities effectively framed the problem of snakebite as a purely medical one, and omitted considering other, broader ways of addressing it.
'Only when we move beyond human activity and medical approach and start asking questions about what is causing human-snake interactions, why people and snakes are choosing the same habitats to live in, can we find mitigation measures to reduce snakebites,' said Gnaneshwar Ch, who leads the program of herpetology at Madras Crocodile Bank in Chennai. 'And that is possible only if we see it as a wildlife conflict, and see snakes as wildlife.'
The kinds of measures that would prove useful include making small modifications to parts of houses that allow easy entry to snakes.
Prajapati's house is a brick structure, with a tin roof, situated on a hill with trees and bushes around. Looking around it, Verma said, 'Here, snakes can enter through drains, or if the doors and windows are left open, or if there are holes made by the rats in the walls.' He added that snakes commonly enter 'kutchha houses' of this kind, and that their residents are particularly vulnerable to snakebites.
Prajapati echoed this observation. 'Mera ghar toh sab khula-khula hai,' – my house is all open, she said.
Verma suggested that blocking entry points in walls, and regular cleaning around a stack of bricks that supported Prajapati's desert cooler could ensure that snakes did not rest there.
The September tragedy has understandably left Prajapati shaken. Since then, neither she nor her older son have spent a night in their home – instead, they rush off to a relative's house as soon as dusk falls.
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C urrently, the responsibility for drawing up policy responses to snakebites lies with the health ministry. Among the ministry's most significant efforts to tackle the problem of snakebites was the National Snakebite Management Protocol issued in 2009, which focused on making anti-snake-venom available as an essential drug – according to government health policy, authorities have to strive to ensure that medicines classified as such have to be widely available in sufficient quantities, at affordable prices. The protocol also focused on training doctors and other health professionals in initial management of snakebites, as well as in providing life support and planning referrals.
More recently, in February 2024, the health ministry released the National Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Snake Envenoming, with the stated goal of 'halving the deaths from snakebite by 2030'.
This plan had a wider scope, and envisioned measures such as engaging with vulnerable communities on awareness to prevent snakebites. As part of the plan, the ministry also took the significant step of declaring snakebites a 'notifiable disease', which would legally require all hospitals to report cases to the government, and therefore mean much more thorough monitoring of the problem.
But experts argue that the new plan also primarily focused on medical interventions, and not enough on its ecological and sociological aspects.
Gnaneshwar acknowledged that it was challenging to portray the problem as more than a medical one. This was because 'snakebites are perhaps the only kind of wildlife conflict that requires a quick medical intervention to save lives', he added, referring to the fact that victims need the timely administering of anti-snake-venom, whereas victims of conflicts with other animals do not need specific drugs to survive.
Moreover, he explained, since common protective measures that were effective against other animals, such as installing fences, do not work in the case of snakes, authorities and locals on the ground tended not to view the problems of snakebites as one of human-wildlife conflict.
In fact, experts noted that there appeared to be an overall lack of clarity on which department should be primarily responsible for snakebites. In many states, snakebites are not just seen as a disease, but also as a 'natural calamity', said Priyanka Kadam, founder of Snakebite Healing and Education Society. 'Because of this, the role of providing compensation due to a snakebite death becomes the responsibility of the disaster management authorities of the state,' she explained. In cases involving other wild animals it is typically the forest department that provides compensation.
Madhya Pradesh did recently attempt an ecological approach to deal with the problem, though experts criticised it as flawed.
Specifically, the forest department reached out to the Wildlife Institute of India to explore the possibility of introducing the king cobra in the state, though the species is not found in the state. The department reasoned that since it was a species that ate other snakes, it would help control populations of other venomous snake species, and thus help curb cases of snakebite.
Gnaneshwar said that it is highly unlikely that such relocations could impact snakebite cases. 'King cobras are active in the Western ghats and in the north-east Indian region. Yet, it does not mean that the snakebite cases are lesser there,' he said. Instead, he added, king cobras could end up preying on non-venomous snakes, and upset the ecological balance in the state.
But though experts disagree with the move, they agree that involving the forest department in policy decisions to tackle snakebites could be a step in the right direction.
Sumanth Bindumadhav, director of the Bengaluru-based Wildlife Protection, Humane World for Animals India, observed that while 'snakebite is a medical emergency for which one would have to work with the health department', it would help to draw a distinction between this aspect of the problem and interactions between humans and snakes, which fall within the 'forest-department domain'.
I nteractions between snakes and humans are changing as a result of the gradual expansion of cities across the country into green spaces.
A 2019 paper by Bindumadhav, for instance, noted that as the city of Bengaluru grew outwards rapidly to accommodate new construction, deforestation and habitat erasure severely damaged biodiversity in and around the city. As a result, snakes tended to come into much greater contact with humans, he wrote.
A closer look at changes like these, experts argue, can help identify populations that need to take greater precautions to ensure that human-snake interactions do not turn into conflicts.
In the lush green campus of the Industrial Training Institute in Gwalior, Preeti Kumar, who works as a support staff member and requested to be identified by a pseudonym, said that deforestation over the years seemed to have changed the interactions that residents had with snakes.
Twenty-five years ago, she recounted, she would walk to her office building, beating a heavy stick on the ground to ward off snakes. But after trees were cut to put up new buildings in the campus, the behaviour of snakes changed, and they began to enter homes much more frequently. A common krait bit her son in her home last November, while he was about to sleep. She quickly took him to a hospital, where he was administered anti-snake-venom, and survived.
'It's not the snake's fault,' she said. 'We have a home to live in. Their home is taken away, where will they go?'
Verma explained that as urbanisation increases, and snakes' natural habitat becomes scarce, during warm months they seek out cool environments, which they often find in people's homes, or in cemented drains.
Ashok Jatav, a cobbler who works at a busy chowk in Gwalior, thinks this was what led to him being bitten. On a monsoon evening last year, as he packed up his small roadside shop, which is adjacent to a forested hill, he lifted up a plastic bag of his belongings, and felt his right hand being struck by fangs. He spotted a striped snake, and rushed to the hospital immediately to be administered anti-snake-venom.
'In all these years, I had never seen a snake here before,' Jatav said. 'But this area is close to the hill, maybe that is why the snake strayed from there and ended up here on cooler stones.'
The doctor in the civil hospital had a similar assessment. 'Gwalior falls in the Chambal region,' he said, noting that the forested areas of the ravines are home to multiple snake species. Their hospital sees as many as 1,000 cases of snakebites through the monsoon season. 'We have a separate wing that responds to snakebite cases all through the year,' he added.
W ildlife experts say that another key step in tackling the problem of snakebites is to communicate information about snake behaviour to those who are at risk.
For instance, knowing about preferred time and patterns of snake activity can help people avoid the reptiles. 'During our awareness programs, we explain to people which species are nocturnal, and what times they prefer to prey,' Gnaneshwar said. 'Based on that, we can then push people to not sleep outside on the floor during the summers.' In contrast, the Madhya Pradesh forest department in its awareness programs, largely focuses on the dos and don'ts of snakebite treatment.
Communication can also help people identify non-venomous snake species that they do not need to fear, and venomous ones, from which they need to keep a distance.
But experts admit it is not easy to change people's mindsets – just across the road from Gwalior's verdant Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management campus, a family insisted that they would prefer killing a snake if it entered the house, regardless of what species it was. 'When our house was under construction a decade ago, a snake had entered and bit my brother,' a resident of a colony said. 'Although he survived, we are scared of them now, it doesn't matter if it is venomous or not.'
He then started a discussion with Sunil Khushwa, another snake rescuer with the forest department, who also works in the fire brigade, reminding him that he spotted a monitor lizard behind their house again and wanted Khushwa to relocate it. 'I have told you so many times that it is not poisonous,' Khushwa said. 'You can just leave it be.'
'But it is huge! We do not want it near our house,' the resident said.
'See, this is the problem we face in case of snakes too,' Khushwa looked towards me. 'Despite telling people that not all species are deadly, many do not easily accept it.'
Some are more willing to adapt. For example, in the Industrial Training Institute campus, Kumar said that now if she sees a snake enter a crack into their home, she 'inserts a polythene bag into it with the help of a thin object, like a pencil' to block its entry, and then 'covers the opening with cement'. She also stuffs a cloth under the gap of the house's door to prevent snakes from coming in.
Bindhumadav said that while rescuers often relocate snakes, this process can lead to further conflicts. In a 2019 paper, he noted that such relocations dramatically escalate the chances of a human-snake encounter again, because moving the animals outside of the small home range they are familiar with can disturb them and lead them to actively look for familiarity again.
This process also harms snakes, he added. 'So, if the snake is found in a drain, and a rescuer relocates it to say, a forest, it can be detrimental to the snake,' he said. Relocation, thus, is particularly avoidable in the case of non-venomous snakes, he explained.
In Gwalior, Khushwa agreed. 'It can also cause snakes to die,' he said. 'So, only when we have a venomous snake, we relocate them in the forests, but if it's a non-venomous one, we relocate it within one-two km radius of where it is found.'
A nother major problem in the current approach to the problem of snakebites, experts point out, is that there is a stark difference between the financial aid provided to the family of an individual who dies from an attack by a wild animal, and one who dies from snakebite.
In Madhya Pradesh, compensation to families who lose a member to an attack of a wild animal, like an elephant or tiger, was recently hiked to Rs 25 Lakh, an amount that is dispensed by the forest department. In contrast, the next of kin of someone who dies from snakebite is Rs 5 lakh, which is paid by the disaster management authority. In fact, in a parliamentary response in 2022, the environment ministry made it clear that snakebites are not their domain, stating that they 'do not have a compensation scheme for snake bite incidents'.
Bindhumadhav argued that snakes, too, were animals that were protected under the Wildlife Protection Act, and that therefore compensation for snake bites should be similar to compensation for deaths caused by other wild animals.
He noted that some officials had told him that the reason snakes were not viewed as wild animals was that most deaths from wild animals occur in forests or on their peripheries, whereas snakebites can happen anywhere.
'I do not agree with that personally,' said Bindumadhav, 'because in many instances tigers or leopards attacks end up happening in villages and outside of the forests, and the department still gives them ex-gratia in those cases.'
In Gwalior, locals were unaware of the processes to be followed even to secure the relatively low compensation. For payment to be cleared, family members must submit essential documents to the district collector's office – specifically, a police report, and more crucially, a post mortem report conducted within 24 hours ascertaining that the death was due to a snakebite. But many are not aware of this and end up performing the final rituals without procuring the post-mortem report.
Prajapati was not aware of the compensation and the documents needed for it. 'Dealing with the loss of my mother and son was so much that it did not even cross my mind to think of a post mortem,' said Prajapati. She faintly remembered a neighbour suggesting postmortems, but male relatives resisted the idea, since it would have meant a delay in receiving the bodies and carrying out final rituals, she said.
Now, after the death of her husband, the sole earning member of the family, Prajapati is using the money from his life insurance policy to raise her older son.
Those who survive snakebites, too, suffer an economic blow, particularly if they are not treated in a government hospital – a doctor in the Gwalior hospital explained that a single vial of anti-snake-venom in a private hospital cost Rs 25,000, also the price that Jatav paid for his dose.
Not many states provide aid for treatment in case victims go to a private hospital. 'At present, only Kerala offers government aid of Rs 50,000 to snake bite victims,' said Kadam.
As policies and awareness programmes still fall short of meeting the needs of those who live at risk of snakebites, the broad approach to the problem remains one that sees interactions between humans and snakes as confrontational. But, as Verma noted, other approaches were also possible. 'Many people think that if there is an encounter with a snake, it means that either the human or the snake will have to die to diffuse the situation,' he said. 'But that is not necessary if people have awareness and take precautions. Co-existence is possible.'