Rokkam Kiran is Vizag’s snake catcher. He catches at least five crawlers a day, taking calls from alarmed householders living in houses at the foot of the city’s hillocks. He has caught 15,000 in his career, and claims to have made a name for himself in the Limca Book of Records and such like.
As with many intrepid snake catchers fed on a diet of NatGeo Wild, he likes to risk it. He carries no cleft stick with him and grabs the intruding reptiles with his bare hands. Needless to say, he doesn’t have a vial of anti-venin on his person. On Wednesday, he caught a 45 kg post-prandial python in Muralinagar in Vizag. It was all in a day’s work for him.
But pythons are easy. If they have had their lunch, they can hardly be bothered to move. Besides, they aren’t poisonous.
But Mr Kiran is beginning to get worried. There have been two instances lately of snake-catchers taking their eyes off their quarry and getting bitten. Last month, Shimoga’s famous snake catcher, named Snake Kiran, was hospitalized after a beautiful albino king cobra got the better of him as he tried to usher it into a bottle.
Back in September, Chikkamagaluru’s snake man, Prafulla Das Bhat, died after being bitten by a king cobra he was trying to catch.
Says Vizag’s Snake Kiran about his namesake from Shimoga, “He is in ICU. I’m getting worried too.”
Rokkam Kiran is not from one of the traditional snake catching communities. He just took to it. He does not remember his first catch but “my brothers say it was a rat snake in the farm behind our house in Mindi.”
He has noticed that snake calls to him have been increasing in recent months. The loss of vegetation on Vizag’s hillsides has resulted in reptiles creeping into human habitations through drains. The District Medical Health Department reports that the number of snake bite cases has increased this year.
In the whole of 2014, the number was 984. In 2015, till October 18, the number stands at 1,683. The reason for the increase, Kiran says, is the loss of green cover due to cyclone Hudhud.
There are 290 species of snakes in India, but only four are venomous: cobra, Russell’s viper, saw-scaled viper and the common krait. According to Kiran, vipers and kraits are the most difficult to catch.
Vipers are agile and sharp and have a tendency to tuck their head into their coils, making it difficult for the catcher to locate the head. Kraits are slippery and move fast.
While district health authorities assure us that the state’s hospitals are well-supplied with anti-venom, Kiran says that’s not enough.
Knowledge of snakebites among doctors is minimal, he says. They have to be sensitised to the finer points of snakebites because time is of crucial importance in treating snakebite victims.
“A doctor should be able to identify a snake from the bite marks. Cobras have two fangs and therefore you’ll see two prick marks. Vipers have four fangs, four prick marks. A person bitten by a cobra will have hazy vision, while viper victims tend to feel suffocated. The doctor should be familiar with these symptoms to be able to administer the right anti-venom dosage. But they just don’t have the knowledge,” he said.
Paid a pittance
The other thing that bugs Kiran is that he gets paid a pittance for doing a service to society.
He would like to dispense his knowledge to others and would have loved to organise a club of snake enthusiasts. But he can’t afford it. The GVMC pays him Rs. 7,000 a month to just be on call and a little extra comes in by way of tips from grateful people.
He started a club to create awareness on snakes and trained about 20 members, but he couldn’t keep it going. “I earn Rs. 200 from each catch, but that’s hardly sufficient to run a society,” he says.
It of little help that his skills have been called upon by the district collector, the VUDA vice-chairman and the GVMC commissioner.
Recent mishaps suffered by snake catchers worries Vizag’s daredevil
