Originally reported and written in November 2023, this story has been republished as part of our archival content.

Last August, Pune’s Ramprakash Kharge woke up with a strange pain in his leg. When he looked at the site of pain, he found it swollen. The 64-year-old farmer wondered if he had slipped in the field to lead to this. Not paying much mind to it, he went to work.

Soon after, he observed that the skin around the bite discoloured. “It turned bluish and blackish and people suspected it could be due to a snakebite,” his son Kiran tells The Better India.

They rushed to Vighnahar Nursing Clinic in Narayangaon where the farmer was kept under observation for three days. “My father was on ventilation. The doctor suspected that he might be bitten by a Russell's viper – one of the most venomous snakes. We were so scared as this was the first such case in our family,” he says.

“We feared that the venom might have spread to the kidneys and heart. The doctor had performed a surgery to remove the toxins. Each moment was difficult for us. But the surgery was successful and my father was safe,” he adds with a sigh of relief.

A 2022 study estimates that India reports at least 64,000 snakebite deaths every year, especially making people living in the rural hinterlands more vulnerable.

But this doctor couple, Sadanand and Pallavi Raut, has saved the lives of at least 6,000 snakebite victims in the region as part of the ‘Mission Zero Snakebite Death’ in Narayangaon.

Kiran says, “That day, the couple saved my father’s life. Like us, people in the stretch of about 150 km rely on his treatment. He is a saviour........

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