Chhattisgarh Rs 17 crore snakebite scam: How doctors, lawyers, clerks and bank employees faked deaths in Bilaspur

Police in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, have arrested 17 people, a doctor, three revenue clerks, lawyers and a bank employee among them, for allegedly rewriting the real causes of death, including a suicide and a heart attack, as snakebite fatalities to claim government compensation. The racket, active since 2018, is estimated at Rs 17.24 crore, and one doctor is still on the run, a TOI report stated.

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Here's the loophole that made it all possible: families of snakebite victims in Chhattisgarh get Rs 4 lakh in state aid. No snake was required to trigger that payout. All it took was the right paperwork, a cooperative doctor, and in some cases, a family that had no idea their relative's file had been quietly rewritten.

A Death Certificate With Two Stories

The strangest case so far comes from Sarkanda. A man died by hanging, and like any suicide, an inquest was opened and a postmortem was carried out, routine, on record, done. Months later, that same inquest number resurfaced, attached this time to a fresh postmortem report claiming a snake had killed him. The person named to collect the compensation didn't appear to exist at all, police say.

Tehsil office clerk Harishankar Rathore and two SDM office staffers, Narendra Kaushik and Garib Ram Binjhwar, were arrested for allegedly building this file and pushing it through the system. All three are now in judicial custody.

The Doctor Accused of Rewriting Cause of Death

Investigators' latest catch is Dr Priyanka Soni, once attached to the Chhattisgarh Institute of Medical Sciences, arrested from Torwa. She's accused of certifying snakebite as the cause of death for people who actually died of something else entirely, cases involving Nisar Khan and Lata Suryavanshi, where police say the real cause was concealed. Three people have already been arrested over those two cases.

Dr Soni isn't done there. She faces a separate case at Civil Lines police station over another death, in which her husband and one more accused are already behind bars. In yet another case, a relative of hers reportedly died of poisoning, and that too, police allege, was logged as a snakebite death.

"It's a Syndicate," Says the SP

Bilaspur SP Rajnesh Singh says the network has been running since 2018, with most of the fraudulent cases dated between 2018 and 2024. "It's a syndicate of lawyers, doctors, their juniors and bank workers. It would be best if the scientific inspection and FSL tests are done in any case reported as snake bite death," the SP said.

The Driver in the Middle

One unlikely figure keeps showing up across the cases: Govind Vishwakarma, a daily-wage driver attached to the municipal corporation. Police suspect he was a key link, connecting revenue department staff with middlemen who arranged the fake claims. Investigators are now checking whether office login credentials were misused to move files through the system unnoticed.

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On July 16, an earlier round of arrests at Sarkanda police station netted lawyer Hiraprasad Khandekar, bank employee Kush Kumar Gupta, one Mahendra Kumar (who claimed to be a lawyer), and Vishwakarma himself, all linked to five suspected fake claims. A lawyer named Shravan Vastrakar, described by police as a lead figure in the network, remains untraced.

How It Came to Light

The scam surfaced after Beltara BJP MLA Sushant Shukla raised it in the state assembly. The numbers he cited told their own story: 431 snakebite deaths reported in Bilaspur over three years, drawing Rs 17.24 crore in compensation. That disclosure set off the investigation that has since led to 16 FIRs across several police stations.

Around 15 more suspected cases are under the scanner, and police are now looking closely at postmortem reports signed by four or five other doctors across CIMS and other health facilities in the district. Investigators are also trying to trace what happened to the compensation money once it landed in beneficiaries' bank accounts, and whether bank staff helped split it among the syndicate. More arrests, police say, are on the way.