Save Lives of Snakebite Victims in Rural India

Public awareness and making the educated is the solution to bringing many issues to the attention of people and making them aware of certain impacts. Likewise, snakebite awareness workshops will benefit the community in many ways teaching them about snakes, their importance, first aid for snakebites, do’s and don’ts of snakebites, etc. Thus we started our journey to educate the community, with special focus given to the rural communities. Our journey to make people AWARE showed that misconceptions are the major enemy among these communities and they strongly believe that their concepts are true. First, we tried to tackle this, and then only we can equip them.

Thus to date, we completed 150+ workshops in several parts of India, especially in the Northern parts. Around 20,000 people were taught and including school and college students, forest officials, laymen, and other government officials. Faith healing and false beliefs were major factors that we addressed during our workshops and these are major reasons for the increased death toll due to snakebite. Maharashtra, Karnataka, Rajasthan, Odisha, Assam, Gujarat, West Bengal, Kerala, and Chhattisgarh are the major states in India where we conducted workshops. Lack of proper first aid and treatment also paved the way to death tolls, thus we trained people on how to provide first aid and Anti Snake Venom (ASV) to rural hospitals.  The major strength is our rural volunteers who are actively conducting workshops using presentations and demonstrations and they help us to reach deep into the rural areas where snakebites are more. Biodiversity loss is another impact of lack of proper knowledge, thus we added a biodiversity component to our workshops.

Co-existence!!!