India is snakebite capital of the world

India has earned the unfortunate reputation of being the snakebite capital of the world with around 60,000 deaths annually and morbidity to roughly 150,000 to 200,000 individuals, according to 

Sumanth Bindumadhav, Director, Wildlife Department, Humane Society International-India.

On the other hand, a large number of snakes are killed for multiple reasons- and these deaths can’t be quantified in numbers. 

Besides, it is also a human-animal conflict with large social dimensions.

Read | Snakebite: India’s silent killer

India is home to more than 300 species of snakes some are venomous.

Among the species of venomous snakes, four of them, the Indian Cobra (Naja naja), Common Krait (Bungarus caeruleus), Russell’s Viper (Daboia russelii) and Saw-scaled Viper (Echis carinatus), stay in proximity of human settlements and are responsible for the majority of the deaths.

“India is the snakebite capital of the world. On the flipside, innumerable numbers of snakes are killed every day in conflict, across the country. The cascading ecological effect of this is so vast that no attempts have been made to quantify it,” said Bindumadhav ahead of World Snake Day, which falls on July 16. 

“Snakebite often gets clouded in the conversation around human-wildlife conflict, which revolves primarily around megafaunas such as tigers, elephants and leopards. Even with those species, the cost of conflict is unfortunately narrowed down to just the amount of crop lost or property destroyed,” Bindumadhav said. 

“We know from studies done in the past that a staggering majority of bites occur in rural India, almost exclusively in farmers and day-wage labourers working with their bare hands and feet on-ground. As is the social norm in most farming communities, it is invariably the male member of the household who is employed in the field and gets paid disproportionately higher wages than his female counterpart. Snakebite is an affliction that affects the primary breadwinner of the family,” the HSI-India chief said. 

"In a scenario where the primary breadwinner, in their most economically productive age, gets bitten by a snake and succumbs to it, the financial burden of this on the family is massive. Worse still, when the primary breadwinner of the family is bitten by a snake and loses a limb or otherwise loses life function, this amounts to years and years of treatment of all forms from surgery to tissue reconstruction to medical equipment to aid them in moving about by themselves. In the course of our work, we’ve seen several individuals, male members of a family, who are bitten by a snake when they are 19-21 years of age, lose a limb and are never able to go back to farming again. In such instances, the family has invariably taken on a mountain of debt from money lenders to pay for the treatment and care itself- which starts looming larger by the day, especially as the person can’t go back to work,” Bindumadhav pointed out.