On a rainy day, a snake does not know that the dry place it has found belongs to a human being.

It may be a garage, a storeroom, a pile of construction material, a drain, a garden, a car bonnet or the space beneath a bed.

If its usual shelter is filled with water, the animal is simply looking for somewhere else to survive.

That is one reason snake encounters become more common during India’s rainy months.

Last monsoon, such encounters ranged from apartment buildings to university campuses. In Agra, rescuers reportedly attended more than 100 snake-rescue calls between June and mid-July, while snakes were also reported inside car bonnets and chicken coops in Kashmir.

The sightings may make for startling photographs. But the scale of the problem is difficult to measure because many bites never enter the formal healthcare system, according to the Government of India’s NCDC Standard Treatment Guidelines for Management of Snake Bite. It notes that many victims initially approach traditional healers and are not registered at hospitals.

A new 2026 study published in PLOS Medicine by researchers associated with the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine estimates that between 2.1 million and 7 million people may be envenomed by snakes globally each year.

Its modelling places India among the countries carrying the largest burden, with estimates of hundreds of thousands of cases and an upper estimate of about 1.3 million snakebites a year.

India’s death toll is also substantial.

Earlier research based on nationally representative mortality data estimated about 58,000 snakebite deaths a year between 2000 and 2019. A 2022 Nature Communications analysis estimated 51,100 snakebite deaths in India in 2019 alone, while noting considerable uncertainty around the figures.

The numbers vary because snakebite remains underreported.

But in India, snakebite is simultaneously a wildlife issue, a public-health problem and a question of how people build and inhabit landscapes.

The Better India looked into public-health data and spoke to Baiju Raj, Director of Conservation Projects and Senior Wildlife Biologist at Wildlife SOS, to understand why these encounters happen, why some become fatal and why even a centuries-old belief about milk can put snakes at risk.

When rain changes the map

Snakes are ectothermic animals, meaning that their body temperature is regulated largely through their surroundings. Weather, temperature and water therefore influence where they can shelter and move.

“When it is sunny, snakes move towards cooler places. That is how........

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