Flood-displaced snakes and serpents overwhelm India’s IT hub

On September 5, at around 10.30 pm, Shuayb Ahmed got a call just as he was about to settle for the night. He was needed for a snake rescue—people trying to take their cars out of a flooded basement parking lot in an apartment complex in Bengaluru, India’s IT hub and home to some of the world’s top companies, had seen a large snake in the water. 

Ahmed, a former IT engineer who runs a homestay for pets, is also a snake rescuer of repute. He rushed out with his equipment—a head-torch, a bag, a hook and a section of pipe – and tried to make his way to the location. 

Bengaluru was in the grip of an unprecedented urban calamity—heavy rains had caused severe waterlogging, inundating large areas of the city, and forcing people to evacuate their homes.

“Getting there was a task,” Ahmed said over the phone. “Took me more than an hour on my bike, going all around Bengaluru trying to avoid water, and then walking a km in waist-deep water to get to the apartment.”

Snake Helplines

Inside the basement parking lot, where the water was three feet deep, Ahmed, in the light of his head-torch, spotted the snake—a large spectacled cobra, more than five feet long.

“Dealing with a cobra swimming in the water is very dangerous,” Ahmed said. But he did what he had to do, and waded in after the snake. As he got within reach, the cobra dove underwater.

“I could do nothing but just stand there, I had no idea where the snake was,” Ahmed said. “It was getting a little scary for me too. I didn’t want to stay in the water as I didn’t know if there were  other snakes in it.”

Thankfully, Ahmed spotted the cobra again a few seconds later, resurfacing some distance away. It took twenty minutes of careful, calm work, all inside the murky water with just a torch as the only source of light, for Ahmed to bag the snake and come out safely with it.

While monsoons in Bengaluru are usually a busy time for those who rescue snakes from homes and offices, the latest floods also inundated snake helplines with calls like never before.

“It’s non-stop,” said Mohan K, who responds to calls made to the snake helpline run by the city’s civic administration. “Usually, each rescuer gets around 10 calls a day. Right now, it’s 20-25. Wetlands are flooded, storm drains are full, there is water everywhere. Where will the poor snakes go?”

On the day TRT World spoke to him, Mohan, who is popularly known as Snake Mohan, had rescued a large female cobra from the garden of an upscale villa—the family had evacuated the house last week, and came back to find the snake. 

Then he got a call from a man who had parked his car next to the highway. He had taken it out of the submerged parking lot of his apartment and was driving it to a workshop when he heard a suspicious rustling sound, only to find a cobra nestled in the storage area of the passenger door.

BBMP, Bengaluru’s civic body, confirmed that they were receiving more calls than usual for snakes, but could not provide an exact number.

“We’ve got calls for snakes in car bonnets, on motorcycles, inside lift shafts in apartment complexes, and of course, inside homes,” said Subhadra Cherukuri, a canine behaviourist and horse-riding instructor who also rescues snakes. 

“There was a whole social media thing that snakes are climbing up pipes and coming out of commodes in bathrooms. They can’t and don’t do that. They simply entered through open windows during the flood.”

One of the areas hit worst by the flooding is the eastern edge or the “IT hub” of the city, a place that went through monumental transformation beginning in the late 1990s, when the city’s tech boom started, leading to rampant construction.

Dr Seemanthini Desai, who lives in a villa in an upscale east Bengaluru neighbourhood, had to evacuate her home as it got inundated last week.

“When my husband and I were wading through the water to get to dry land, other people, from higher ground, were warning us that snakes were swimming past us,” she said. “But what to do? We kept walking.”

On returning home, when the water receded, she found four snakes curled under sofas.

“Two checkered keelbacks and two sand boas,” Dr Desai, whose father was a forest officer, said. “They are easy to catch (and non-venomous). The keelbacks curl up and bury their heads under their tails if you touch them and then you can gently push them into a bag.”

Co-exist with snakes

Dr Desai released the snakes just outside her home, but most people insist that snakes be relocated far from their houses. Bengaluru’s civic body also directs its catchers to release rescued snakes in forest areas outside city limits.

“It’s a death sentence for the snakes,” said Gerry Martin, a herpetologist and conservationist who runs the Liana Trust, an organisation that works on snake ecology, venom, behaviour, and human-snake conflict mitigation. 

“Relocation is a concept that was rejected at least a decade back. But people insist, and many rescuers do it because they make money from it. Non-venomous snakes compete with cobras and vipers for resources. So, when you remove a non-venomous snake, you are opening the space for a venomous snake to come in there.”

Most of Bengaluru’s volunteer snake rescuers, like Ahmed and Cherukuri, run awareness campaigns to help people understand how to co-exist with snakes, how to avoid conflict, and to tell the difference between a venomous and non-venomous snake.

“I can tell people that a rat snake (a species commonly found in Bengaluru) is harmless and so timid that it will run away from a one-year-old child,” said Cherukuri. “But if people have decided that they can’t live with it, they will still insist on relocation.”

The one thing that snake rescuers and herpetologists agree on is the rapid and calamitous loss of habitat for the city’s wildlife. It’s also the reason why waterlogging happens frequently. Over the years, Bengaluru has lost most of the lakes it was famous for, along with a network of wetlands, grasslands, canals and streams, to the massive construction projects fuelled by the IT boom, leaving little space for rainwater to go.  

“There’s no shelter, no habitat,” Mohan said, “we have left the snakes with no place to live.”

Ahmed, who was part of a major study that identified the different species of snakes in Bengaluru (the first study of its kind since 1874), said that many species have all but vanished from the city.

“I am desperate to see a beautiful green keelback, or the common cat snake, olive keelbacks, or green vine snakes,” said Ahmed. “But you don’t get to see them anymore in the city.