A farmer in Punjab loses roughly a quarter of every harvest to rats before the grain even reaches storage. Across India, rodents destroy an estimated one-fifth of the country’s total food and grain production each year — a loss that runs into billions of dollars and directly threatens food security in a country that can least afford it. Yet the animal best equipped to stop this, one that costs nothing, needs no fuel, and works around the clock, is routinely killed on sight by the very farmers it protects. That animal is the snake, and India’s reflexive hostility toward it is quietly undermining the country’s own food supply.
Rodents are not a minor nuisance. Reviews of pre-harvest losses put the damage to cereal crops like rice and wheat at 5 to 15 per cent in a typical year, and in severe outbreak years, losses to individual fields have run far higher. Post-harvest, national estimates put losses at roughly a quarter to a third of stored grain, disappearing into rat burrows and rodent guts. Add to this the role rodents play in spreading diseases like leptospirosis and plague, and the case for controlling them becomes urgent, not optional.
This is precisely where snakes earn their keep. A single rat snake or cobra moving through a paddy field or grain store can consume dozens of rodents in a season, and unlike poison bait, a snake doesn’t linger in the food chain to kill the owls, cats, and dogs that eat poisoned rodents afterward. Ecologists who study predator-exclusion have shown the same pattern again and again: remove natural predators like snakes from a field and rodent populations expand unchecked, driving crop losses sharply higher within a single season. In parts of India’s coffee-growing belt, plantations have gone further and deliberately encourage snakes — including venomous species like cobras, kraits, and Russell’s vipers — to patrol the grounds, training workers to recognise and safely coexist with them. The result has been fewer rodents, healthier yields, and, notably, fewer snakebite incidents, because educated workers no longer panic and provoke the animals they encounter.
And yet, across most of the country, the instinct when a snake appears is to kill it. Centuries of folklore, religious ambivalence, and genuine fear of venomous bites have created a culture where a snake in the field or the house is treated as a threat to be eliminated rather than a service to be protected. India also carries the world’s heaviest burden of snakebite deaths, with more than 1.2 million recorded since 2000, and that toll understandably fuels dread. But the fear is misapplied. Public health experts studying the crisis point out that killing snakes doesn’t reduce that burden — it removes the natural check on the rodent populations that damage crops and spread disease, creating a different kind of harm in the process. The transaction is not “fewer snakes, fewer risks.” It’s “fewer snakes, more rats, more crop loss, more chemical rodenticide use, and no meaningful drop in snakebite incidents,” since bites overwhelmingly happen through accidental encounters, not through the presence of a controlled, understood population.
Chemical rodenticides, the default fallback once natural predators are gone, come with their own costs. They are expensive to apply before every growing season, they poison non-target species up the food chain, including birds of prey and the very snakes meant to be doing this job for free, and they increasingly run up against the demands of export markets that want produce grown with fewer chemical inputs. A snake does what a rodenticide does, without the residue, without the recurring cost, and without collateral damage to the rest of the ecosystem.
None of this requires India to declare snakes harmless. Venomous species are genuinely dangerous, and the country’s snakebite mortality crisis deserves the serious public health response it is finally starting to receive. But protecting human life and protecting snakes are not competing goals — they are the same goal, addressed through education rather than eradication. Agricultural extension programs already advise farmers not to kill snakes, monitor lizards, or other natural rodent predators in their fields. What’s missing is the wider cultural shift to back that advice: teaching rural and urban communities alike to identify common species, understand which pose genuine risk, and know what to do when they encounter one, the same way plantation workers in India's coffee belt have learned to do.
The snake sliding through a grain store or a paddy field is not a threat to the harvest. It is the reason there’s a harvest to protect in the first place. Everyone killed out of fear is one less predator standing between a farmer’s crop and the rodents actively destroying it. A country already losing billions of dollars a year to pests it could control for free has little reason to keep killing off the animal doing that work.
K Kalidasu is a wildlife enthusiast with an immense interest in snakes and its ecological role in India's farmlands. He writes to raise awareness about coexistence between farmers and native wildlife.
Views expressed are the author’s own and don’t necessarily reflect those of Down To Earth