Friday, 05 September 2025
Friday, 05 September 2025
Jhuma Sardar was bitten by a kalach – common krait – around 2.30am when she was asleep at home. The 35-year-old woman died at Canning Government Hospital on September 3. The delay in arranging transportation and reaching the hospital proved fatal.
Dr Samar Roy, a snakebite specialist at the hospital, said the primary cause of the death was the lack of awareness regarding snakebites. “The significant delay in reaching the hospital resulted in complete respiratory muscle paralysis,” he said.
Swapan Bhuniya, a 42-year-old snake rescuer, had a fortunate escape. During a snake rescue operation, he was bitten by a Russell’s viper. “I managed to secure the snake in a bag and reached Subhasgram Hospital within 15 minutes,” he recounted.
Hundreds of lives are lost each year to snake bites in Bengal, , except that that is not the official reason for the deaths. The data — and the discrepancy in them — are staggering.
Bengal records one of the highest incidences and deaths due to snakebite in India. But replies received in June 2025 to a Right to Information (RTI) application filed two months prior by a practising herpetologist, Suvrajyoti Chatterjee, provide numbers that appear to be divorced from ground reality.
“The RTI data for 2024-25, even with high numbers, fails to capture the reality of snakebite deaths for some districts,” Chatterjee, secretary of Human and Environment Alliance League, an NGO, tells The Telegraph Online from the Sunderbans, a region that expectedly records high numbers every year.
“Across the 27 districts in Bengal in the RTI reply, if one looks at the numbers in South 24 Parganas for the last three years [2022-2024], snakebite deaths stand at three, four and 13 respectively. That’s a drastic reduction. This is very different from what we are witnessing on the ground, or what journal studies have already shown us. In fact, each monsoon there are many snakebite incidents.”
And deaths.
Speaking with The Telegraph Online from her village in the Kultali Community Development Block near the Sunderbans, Rupa Sardar, secretary of the local panchayat, says that the number of snakebite deaths has decreased, but they are much higher than official figures indicate.
“The trouble with snakes is a constant here. People would often go to local healers and quacks, which lead to deaths,” she says. “Yes, awareness has increased and that has helped reduce deaths, but in the remote villages surrounded by rivers, fatalities still occur.”
For proof of Chatterjee’s “drastic reduction”, we look at the Union Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation's (MSPI) 2021-2022 national data. They show zero deaths and zero cases in West Bengal.
The reason cited is unavailability of data. But data exist. Records accessed by The Telegraph Online show at least 100 cases at Canning alone between 17 January 2022 and 31 December 2022. A number the Juktibadi Sanskritik Sanstha in Canning, an organisation working on snakebites, confirms is likelier. Of that number, there have been some deaths as well. A response to an RTI application by Chatterjee throws up 2240 cases in South 24 Parganas, including three deaths.
“Of course, we have received snakebite cases here at the Canning Government Hospital, and its increasing,” Dr Samar Roy says.
Why the discrepancy in the data?
Firstly, it is not restricted to West Bengal. MSPI data show Uttar Pradesh to have had 36 deaths in 2022 alone.
The response to Chatterjee’s RTI application shows zero deaths for the same year in the state. In the MSPI data, Kerala, a high-prevalence snakebite-death region, is also shown to have zero cases and deaths for the year.
Delhi, Ladakh and Lakshadweep are the other regions with ‘zero’ against their names.
Gnaneswar C. from the Centre for Herpetology at Madras Crocodile Bank points to an initial study in 2011 by noted herpetologist Romulus Whitaker — whose famous snake park in Chennai was visited by Satyajit Ray in the 1980s — which gave the estimate for snakebite deaths in India to be 46,000 a year between 2013 and 2016.
That number, according to a later study that also involved Whitaker, had gone up to 58,000 per year.
“That estimate was a big number that everyone sat up and noticed,” Gnaneswar says. “This number bridged the divide between the actual snakebite deaths and the official data, and for the first time, people had a sense of the magnitude of the problem. The experts arrived at the figure using the Million Death Study [MDS], a mortality survey in India undertaken in 2011. Researchers used a method of verbal autopsies, essentially asking family members about the reason of death, and found discrepancy with the deaths recorded at hospitals.”
How snakebite incidents and deaths are recorded
So how is snakebite reporting done? In Accidental Deaths and Suicides in India (ADSI), published by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), snakebites often are marked under different subheads like “poisoning” and “sudden deaths”.
This leads to a reduction in the number.
“Again, though the patients enter hospitals with suspected snakebites, there are cases where the post-mortem report does not say the cause of death is snakebite, but it could be something else. Often it labels it as poisoning or kidney failure,” Gnaneswar says.
The ADSI data that capture snake bite deaths under “poisoning” record a far bigger number than the West Bengal RTI data obtained by Chatterjee.
The ADSI shows 478 deaths in 2022. The RTI says a total of 297 deaths for the year. For the record, in West Bengal, the number of deaths for 2023 and 2024 were 245 and 485 respectively in the RTI response.
This divergence, that continues to exist despite several studies, brings to the fore not only the hidden toll of snakebites but the profound ways in which flawed data collection shapes both public perception and policy.
‘First line of medical response is weak’
Last month, The Telegraph had reported on the ordeal of a nine-year-old boy in Nadia who ran from pillar to post for a hospital to take him in after he was bitten by a snake.
Bijan Bhattacharya, secretary of Sanstha in Canning, who has been spreading awareness about snake bites and its treatment since 1986, suggests that there is more to the issue when it comes to medical research, and the influence of various groups on snakebite policies.
“People might be pushing different agendas. I remember around 2015-16, there was a sudden theory that the anti-venom serum [AVS] was ineffective against chandrabora (Russell’s viper) bites in Bengal. This theory became a tool for some doctors to deflect blame for deaths,” he says. “Over the years, different groups have promoted various types of AVS and even influenced the dosage.”
Bhattacharya says that most often, a patient reaches doctors after the “golden hour”, a critical window of about three-to-six hours within which an AVS is most effective.
“Basic tests take time, the kidney gets damaged by then. Also, I have seen through helpline calls how dialysis for snakebite victims is not a priority and gets delayed. In short, the first line of medical response is weak.”
Simply, a snakebite patient in a remote part of West Bengal is on an uphill climb to survive after being bitten.
Dr Roy, who has saved several snakebite victims and also has a YouTube channel to raise awareness on the matter, agrees that the infrastructure is not up to the mark and the efficacy of the AVS, though effective, needs to be explored and improved more.
Raising awareness on a war footing
For 34-year-old Saikat Ghosh, who owes his life partly to the efforts of doctors, including Dr Roy, at the Canning Hospital, things took a drastic turn on his sister Pallabi’s 21st birthday in August 2016. Saikat, his parents, and relatives had gathered at their village house in Jeliakhali on that day.
“After the celebrations, my parents and I were on the verandah at night when we were bitten by a snake, but we didn’t realise it. The next morning, my mother started vomiting. I experienced breathing difficulties, had incoherent speech and body pain. My father didn’t show any symptoms initially,” Saikat recalls.
They went to Canning Hospital. His mother’s condition deteriorated sharply and she died within 30 minutes. Saikat was transferred to an ICU, put on a ventilator, and managed to survive. His father was administered AVS.
“The doctor thought that order of the bites was first my mother, then me, and then my father,” Saikat says.
Ten years on, Saikat and his sister have become warriors to spread awareness about snakebites. Saikat, who teaches children English, takes time out in every batch and spends at least two days telling children how to react and not panic after a snakebite.
“I think lack of knowledge leads to deaths,” he says.
Little basic awareness and poor medical infrastructure in most parts of the state is a double-whammy for victims.
The earliest recorded snakebite incident in Bengal is to be found in the Manasamangal Kavya, composed in the 13th and 15th centuries, as an ode to Manasa, the goddess of snakes.
Since there won’t be any miraculous resurrections of snake-bite victims like in the epic poem, better data management and first-line response, wider availability of AVS, and increased awareness might well be the best course of action in the modern world.
