A two-year-old boy in India survived what could have been a lethal encounter with a cobra in the most bizarre way: He bit its head off.
News reports said Govinda Kumar was playing at his home in Bankatwa village in India’s eastern state of Bihar on July 25 when a nearly metre-long cobra slithered close by.
He mistook the venomous snake for a toy and tried to grab it, according to Times of India.
The cobra coiled itself around the boy’s hand.
Startled, Govinda reacted by biting the snake’s head clean off.
“He killed it on the spot,” the boy’s grandmother Mateshwari Devi was quoted by the Times of India as saying.
The boy then passed out and was rushed to a hospital.
He was transferred to the Government Medical College and Hospital Bettiah for specialist care, where doctors treated him for ingesting some of the snake’s venom when he bit it.
Dr Saurab Kumar, an associate professor at the hospital’s paediatrics department, told The Telegraph Govinda likely survived because the cobra’s venom did not enter his bloodstream.
The boy sank his teeth into the cobra, but the cobra was not able to bite him, he said.
“I received the child active and alert, but his mouth and face was swollen because of the reaction to the venom in the oral cavity,” said Dr Kumar.
Cobra venom contains neurotoxins that can impair the nervous system and damage tissues and blood cells, with the severity of symptoms depending on the species.
Govinda was discharged on July 26.
According to 2023 data from the World Health Organisation, snakes bite some 5.4 million people globally each year, leading to as many as 137,880 deaths.
The number of people left with amputations or permanent disabilities may be up to three times higher.
India accounts for roughly half of all snake bite-related deaths, according to a report published by News Decoder earlier in 2025.
The country has around 300 species of snakes, including 60 highly venomous species such as the Russell’s vipers, kraits, and the saw-scaled viper, which are responsible for most of the bite-related deaths.
The Indian cobra completes this list of the “big four” species responsible for the most snake bites in India.
