A village in Pingla. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

July 10: Ajit Das has achieved instant popularity in the flood-hit villages of Pingla and Sabang — he is an expert in catching snakes.

Armed with an iron rod that has a hook at the end of it and a jute sack, the 42-year-old shuttles between a dozen villages responding to SOS from villagers whose houses have become safe havens for cobras and other snakes escaping the flood waters.

He has caught two dozen of them in the past three days.

“Like many in our Jonhat village, I had taken shelter on the tin roof of my house with my mother, wife Tumpa and two-year-old son Subhadeep. Last night, two cobras coiled around a pole next to the bamboo platform we had built for sleeping. Ajit came on a banana tree raft, caught the snake and put it in his sack,” said Swapan Majhi, daily labourer.

Congress MLA from Sabang, Manas Bhuniya, overseeing relief operations, said 20 snakebite victims were sent to Calcutta from the villages for treatment.

Gopi Mondal, 58, of Srimantapur in Ghatal and Satish Dolai, 40, of Mansukha village, died of snakebites last night, said Rabindranath Maity, assistant chief medical officer of West Midnapore.

Four more bodies were recovered in the district, but only one was identified. She was Bana Barui of Chandipur.

Chief secretary Amit Kiran Deb said a dozen missing bodies were not found in the mud in Danton when district officials were sent there for inspection. “We found only the decomposed body of a woman.”

Fresh areas in the 50 flooded villages spread across six gram panchayat areas of Pingla faced inundation threat again after an embankment in Chandia river was breached. Nartha, Bural and Gangra were among the villages in danger. The army continued rescue operations in Sabang, Pingla and Ghatal.

In East Midnapore, the flood situation improved, but outbreaks of gastro-enteritis were reported from Egra.

Officials at Writers’ Buildings said the flood toll in Bengal rose to 45 today, though the overall situation has improved.