DAILY MAIL (London, UK) 19 December 13 Patna registry office forced to call in snake charmers after poisonous reptiles invade (Giridhar Jha)

Work at the Patna district registry office under the Registration, Excise and Prohibition department has come to a standstill because of an all-pervading fear of poisonous snakes.

Employees of the office are mortally afraid to enter its record room, which is believed to have turned into a safe haven for venomous reptiles.

As a result no documents are being taken out from the room, hampering the day-to-day work at the otherwise bustling office.

According to officials, more than 250 applications seeking old documents have been pending for the past month. The fear of snakes is not without reason, though.

Last month, a pair of cobras were caught in the record room by a team of four snake charmers after strenuous efforts. But the problem was far from over, as an office member claimed to have sighted another snake last week. This left everybody panicky, forcing senior officials to send another SOS to the snake charmers.

Ashok Kumar Thakur, district sub-registrar, said that more snakes might be hidden inside the dark room.

"We have hired snake charmers from other districts but they are not able to catch the snakes for the past three days," he said.

"This has hampered the work as we are not able to take the documents out from the record room."

The snake charmers are faced with a Herculean task despite all their expertise. They have to go inside the record room with a torch to catch the snakes since there is no light there. The department officials said no electricity supply had been provided to the room since a short circuit might lead to the destruction of important documents in the resultant fire.

The problem started when one of the employees noticed a big snake slough inside the record room last month. He also noticed a snake slithering away from the heaps of dusty files stacked there.

This prompted staff to call two snake charmers from Jehanabad the next day, but they could not catch any of the reptiles. After their unsuccessful bid, four other snake charmers were hired from Daniyawa in Patna district, and finally managed to catch a pair of cobras from inside the record room.

The employees, however, were in for a rude shock when one of them noticed another black snake the other day.

Snake charmers were called again on Monday, and tried all their tricks to lure the snakes out of the room - but to no avail.

According to sources, land records for the past 150 years have been stored in the room. Though all the documents of the office are being stored digitally since 2005, older records are still maintained on paper.

The Building Construction department is said to have sanctioned a plan to build a new building for the registry office but the project is yet to take off.
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