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

Late 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...

Read more

News