Why Madhya Pradesh CM's wish to count snakes and rear king cobras is unfeasible

Indian Express

21-06-2025

A king cobra brought to Bhopal's Van Vihar zoo from Karnataka's Mangalore zoo in exchange for a tiger died in its enclosure on June 18.
Chief Minister Mohan Yadav is keen on 'reintroducing' king cobras in Madhya Pradesh as an antidote to spiralling snakebite deaths. He also wants snakes in the state counted in order to assess numbers of the venomous ones.
There are two problems with the CM's plans.
One, there is no protocol for counting snakes in the wild because nobody ever considered it feasible or necessary.
Two, irrespective of the merits of the claim that king cobras once inhabited the hot, dry forests of Madhya Pradesh, the selection of source — Karnataka — did not take into account new research that shows all king cobras are not the same.
The king cobra, the world's longest venomous snake, can grow to 15 feet in length. It prefers humid, dark forests with thick undergrowth, cool swamps, and bamboo patches across diverse habitats — from highland evergreen and semi-evergreen forests to estuarine mangroves with high rainfall.
In India, the king cobra's range includes the Western Ghats, the North Indian terai belt, Northeast India, the mangrove coastlines of West Bengal and Odisha, Andaman and Nicobar, and parts of the Eastern Ghats.
Since 2014, king cobras have been reported in Korba, eastern Chhattisgarh — hundreds of kilometres from Srikakulam in Andhra Pradesh or Berhampur in Orissa, the established range of the species. This has raised hopes of finding king cobras in the adjoining forests of Satpura and Sanjay Dubri tiger reserve in Madhya Pradesh.
That said, there is no reliable historical record of the presence of the king cobra in the dry deciduous forests of central India. 'There is no record of a confirmed sighting of a king cobra in the forests of MP,' a former senior state forest official said.
'We don't have enough perennial sources of water or even extended tracts of dense vegetation to provide cool niches in the summer. There could be occasional edge populations but that does not put MP in the king cobra's range,' the former forest official said.
Until recently, king cobras were considered one species, Ophiophagus hannah. However, in 2021, a study led by wildlife biologist Gowri Shankar used genetic and morphometric (shape and size) data for 'a species delimitation analysis', which identified four geographically separate lineages.
These are, from west to east, an endemic Western Ghats lineage; a widespread Asian mainland lineage distributed from northern and eastern India to China and Thailand; and two other lineages distributed in the Malay Peninsula, the Greater Sunda Islands, and the Philippines.
Subsequently, the small endemic population of king cobras in the hills of Western Ghats — Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Goa, and adjacent areas of Maharashtra — was distinguished as a separate species (Ophiophagus kaalinga), different from the king cobras found in the rest of India, including the Korba population closest to MP.
On the one hand, therefore, a king cobra brought from Karnataka to MP would be of a hill-dwelling species unused to central India's dry, bare, and hot forests.
On the other hand, any plan to source king cobras endemic to the Western Ghats to raise a wild population in central India is a recipe for eventual hybridisation — something that experts have warned against.
A study by an international team of researchers published in the European Journal of Taxonomy last year underlined that the king cobra species endemic to the Western Ghats is 'restricted to relatively small areas and highly threatened habitats', and 'understanding the systematics of the genus' is important for identifying captive stocks for conservation.
'Any captive breeding and reintroduction efforts must ensure that species are not allowed to hybridise, and that only the appropriate local species is released in any reintroduction programme,' the study said.
This is worrisome because the collective population of king cobras, viewed as one species until recently, evoked a false sense of security and was placed under the 'vulnerable' category by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the global authority on the status of species. But as a separate species endemic to the Western Ghats, the Ophiophagus kaalinga is likely to be highly endangered.
'If at all MP had to source king cobras, they could have adhered to the taxonomic updates and made attempts to bring snakes from the Northeast. Anyway, no state has surplus king cobras to support this ecologically unsound experiment,' Vivek Sharma, a Jabalpur-based herpetologist and founder of the Snakehub app, said.
'When a king cobra slithers on the ground, other snakes flee from their holes, and the king cobra hunts them… Since the king cobra has vanished, districts like Dindori, where I was minister-in-charge, have seen up to 200 snakebite deaths annually,' Chief Minister Yadav told foresters earlier this year.
The CM wants to assess the populations of venomous snakes before unleashing king cobras on them. However, king cobras, the only snake species that builds nests for its eggs, do not breed well in captivity. In the best case scenario, 'it may take decades to reasonably populate' a sizable part of MP, a senior scientist at the Dehradun-based Wildlife Institute of India (WII) said.
'King cobras tend to stay away from human habitations. So their impact on reducing venomous snakes in human-dominated areas can be felt only when king cobra populations reach a certain level,' the WII scientist said.
Experts are also perplexed about the call for a snake census. 'It is not possible to count snakes with any degree of accuracy in the wild. There is no protocol for a snake census anywhere in the world because nobody ever considered it feasible or even necessary from a conservation standpoint,' Jose Louies, CEO, Wildlife Trust of India, and founder, indiasnakes.org, said.
Jay Mazoomdaar is an investigative reporter focused on offshore finance, equitable growth, natural resources management and biodiversity conservation. Over two decades, his work has been recognised by the International Press Institute, the Ramnath Goenka Foundation, the Commonwealth Press Union, the Prem Bhatia Memorial Trust, the Asian College of Journalism etc.
Mazoomdaar's major investigations include the extirpation of tigers in Sariska, global offshore probes such as Panama Papers, Robert Vadra's land deals in Rajasthan, India's dubious forest cover data, Vyapam deaths in Madhya Pradesh, mega projects flouting clearance conditions, Nitin Gadkari's link to e-rickshaws, India shifting stand on ivory ban to fly in African cheetahs, the loss of indigenous cow breeds, the hydel rush in Arunachal Pradesh, land mafias inside Corbett, the JDY financial inclusion scheme, an iron ore heist in Odisha, highways expansion through the Kanha-Pench landscape etc. ... Read More