After a 34-year-old fisherman, Hitesh Govari, was attacked by a bull shark in the Vaitarna river in Palghar while swimming on Tuesday, a leading researcher working on sharks told mid-day that India had just 21 unprovoked shark encounters on record in more than 400 years.

During an interaction with mid-day, Alissa Barnes—a leading researcher on sharks— told mid-day that the human-shark conflict in India is extremely rare. “According to the International Shark Attack File, Florida (the only global database that records shark bites), India had 21 unprovoked shark encounters in more than four centuries,” Barnes, co-lead of ‘Sharks and Rays’—a marine program of Wildlife Conservation Society WCS-India—said.