Beed: A 12-year-old girl died of a snakebite on Tuesday evening in Gaurwadi village in Kaij tehsil after a delay in arranging transport prevented her family from rushing her to a hospital in time, according to villagers.
The victim, identified as Supriya Babru Ghadge, was a Class 7 student at the local Zilla Parishad primary school.
According to villagers, Supriya was playing outside her home around 6pm after returning from school when a venomous snake bit her. Her family frantically searched for a vehicle to take her to the nearest medical facility, but none was immediately available in the village. The lack of timely transport, compounded by the family’s extreme poverty, delayed medical intervention.
By the time the family managed to arrange transport and reach the government cottage hospital in Neknoor, doctors examined her and declared her brought dead.
When contacted, hospital superintendent Dr Ashok Hubekar confirmed that the girl had been brought dead.
The tragedy has left the local community shaken, highlighting the difficult socio-economic conditions faced by rural households in the district. Supriya had lost her father, Babru Ghadge, in an accident two years ago. Since then, her mother had been the sole breadwinner, struggling to raise six children — five daughters and a son — by working as a sugarcane-cutting labourer.
Her mother was preparing to leave for seasonal sugarcane-cutting work at a sugar mill in the coming days when the tragedy struck. Villagers expressed deep grief and anger over the incident, pointing to the family’s poverty and the lack of emergency transport and healthcare facilities in remote rural areas.
