Mobile apps aim to take venom out of snake bites

All was very quiet at the home of Nitin Kumbhar when his mobile phone rang close to midnight, shattering the stillness that had settled around his village in Kolhapur of Maharashtra.

The caller was almost shrieking. 

“Saanp ghus gaya hai ghar mein,” (a snake has entered our house), the panic-stricken person at the other end yelled, totally flustered by the intrusion of an uninvited but lethal visitor.

Snakes are a deadly scourge in much of rural India, accounting for some 64,000 snakebite deaths every year, and Suraj Sarnaik – the caller – had reasons to be scared.

His mother had spotted the large reptile slithering across a room and had alerted him. A mortally alarmed Sarnaik then immediately called Kumbhar for help.

App support

Known locally for being a snake catcher of some repute, Kumbhar instantly opened up the SnakeHub app on his mobile to figure out how dangerous the intruder could be.

The description of the snake that Sarnik provided matched with that of the deadly Russell’s viper. Kumbhar thereafter wasted no time. He rushed to Sarnik’s home in Gunki village with a stick.

“I quickly set up a trap and managed to get the snake out of the house. I finally left it in a distant field,” he recollected.

Apps such as SnakeHub are coming in handy for part-time snake catchers like Kumbhar, who works as a security guard at a local college. The apps – and there has been a proliferation of them in recent years – are making details about snakes readily available at fingertips.

Information at fingertips

There are quite a few apps these days, apart from SnakeHub. They include SARPA (Snake Awareness, Rescue and Protection app), Serpent, Snakepedia, The Snakebite Assistant, Indian Snakes and Snake Helpline.

Though with different names, the apps provide similar service. They all impart knowledge about different varieties of snakes, report snakebites and help to identify nearby health facilities.

In India which has a gigantic snake problem, the apps with their ready information could after all spell the difference between life and death.

“The world has become digital. We have apps for food and travel. So, naturally there was a need for a snake app as well,” Jose Louise, who helped develop the Indiansnakes.org website and later Serpent app, pointed out.

Kumbhar agrees that the apps are a godsend. In earlier times, he would Google to find little or no information on the snakes. But the apps have made things much easier.

“Because of the Snakehub app and its regional Marathi interface, I now know about 300 snakes, their characteristics, habitat, etc”, he explained.

Snakehub, used by around 19,000 people across the country, is a brainchild of Jabalpur-based wildlife biologist Vivek Sharma, who developed the app in partnership with a Kerala-based institute and launched it for public use in September 2020.

“My motive behind developing this app was to make information around snakebites easily accessible to people like Kumbhar,” Sharma said.

Apps such as SnakeHub allow people to check where and what kind of treatment facilities and rescuers are available in their vicinity.

The apps help to connect people with accessible service providers in case of snake-related emergencies.

Rajkiran Desai of Nesari village in Kolhapur has always had a keen interest in reptiles and insects since the region he hails from has been an epicentre of human-snake encounters because of its large swathes of agricultural land.

He has been using the apps since the knowledge they impart helps snakes as well.

“People get scared and kill even non-venomous snakes which is not healthy for our ecology,” Desai said. Now that he is more aware about which snake is poisonous and which is not, he is helping to raise awareness among locals that not every kind of snake needs to be unnecessarily killed.

Need of the hour

India has over 300 species of snakes of which only 62 are venomous or semi-venomous. The most deadly are only four: Indian cobra, common krait, Russell’s viper and saw-scaled viper. Together, they account for 95 percent of all snakebite deaths in the country.

According to a study published in Nature Communications in October 2022, India accounted for 80 percent of the 78,600 snakebite deaths that occurred worldwide in 2019. More worryingly, some 97 percent of such deaths occurred in rural India with only 20-30 percent of victims seeking medical attention. The rest presumably died untreated.

Much could be done to avert so many deaths and the apps are attempting to assist in raising awareness and battling snakebites.

“The biggest problem is unawareness,” said Priyanka Kadam of Snakebite Healing and Education Society that last year launched the Snakebite Assistant app.

Though ordinary citizens are taking to the apps in increasing numbers, they remain more popular with rescuers, forest guards and conservationists.

“It is because a common man wouldn’t like to wake up by looking at snake pictures in the morning,” explained Vishwa Urvanam, a Tamil Nadu-based conservationist.

The apps however have awakened many to the silent terror of snakebites across the country. 

“It would be interesting to see how helpful these apps would prove to be if the government institutions intervene and promote them across the country,” added Urvanam.

Sooner the government does, it undoubtedly would be better.

The lead image at the shows snakepedia application (Photo by Jyoti Thakur)

Jyoti Thakur is an independent journalist based out of Delhi. She covers gender, environment and social justice. She is a Rural Media Fellow 2022 at Youth Hub, Village Square.