2018: kits, bans and "22 deaths to 0"
Published 7 October 2026
The second spraying season began under a different set of rules. The Indian Express reported on Thursday, June 28, 2018 that Maharashtra had banned the sale of five moderately-to-extremely toxic insecticides and cancelled the licences of six companies for the current kharif season, to prevent a recurrence of the 2017 inhalation accidents. The paper counted those accidents as the deaths of 62 farmers and agricultural labourers across the state. Subhash Katkar, the chief quality control officer of the state agriculture department, listed the five products by class: acephate 75 percent and diafenthiuron 50 percent as moderately toxic, fipronil with imidacloprid and profenofos with cypermethrin as highly toxic, and monocrotophos 36 percent as extremely toxic.
The six companies whose storage-to-sale licences were cancelled, as Katkar named them to the paper, were FMC India Pvt Ltd, Cheminova India Ltd, Biostadt India Ltd, Bharat Insecticides Ltd, Krishi Rasayan Exports Pvt Ltd and Rainbow Crop Health Ltd. The Indian Express quotes him but does not report the companies' response, and the report does not say why each licence was cancelled. The record therefore makes no claim about the conduct of any of those companies, only about the state's action as its officer described it.
Katkar was clear about the limit of the state's power. According to the same article, the ban was temporary even though the products were found to be hazardous. "The state government doesn't have authority to impose a permanent ban," he said. "It can only stop their sale for 60 days, which is what we have done. But we have recommended to the Centre that these insecticides be permanently banned." That sentence settles the question left open about how far the November 2017 order went. By Katkar's account the 2018 measure was again a 60-day stop on the same five formulations that had been floated in October 2017.
The Indian Express also gave the 2017 numbers as the state's officers then counted them. Out of the 62 deaths reported in Maharashtra, it said, 21 were in Yavatmal district, which also recorded over 800 hospitalisations. Other districts in Vidarbha recorded 31 deaths, with the rest in Khandesh (4), Marathwada (3) and western Maharashtra (3). That adds up to 62 only if the Yavatmal figure is included, and the paper does not give it as a sum. Where sources differ, the Times of India's March report from the Lok Sabha had 21 for Yavatmal and 42 elsewhere for a total of 63, reported on Wednesday, March 7, 2018, and the Business Standard gave 63 for the state. The 62 and 63 are one death apart and the sources do not explain it.
The Times of India's March 2018 report adds the national context. It says the agriculture ministry told the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, March 6, 2018 that Maharashtra reported as many as 272 deaths from pesticide poisoning in four years, which the paper took to mean the danger had been around for long. The paper also said that monocrotophos, whose unapproved mixture it said was reportedly blamed for the majority of deaths in Yavatmal, still figured in the list of 66 pesticides used in India despite bans or restrictions elsewhere. It said the SIT had found that most victims had used monocrotophos, either pure or mixed with another pesticide.
The paper again quoted the farm activist Kavitha Kuruganti of the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture, who said the state could still act by suspending licences or stopping fresh licences or renewals. "If states like Kerala and Punjab can find ways to ban use of certain pesticides, Maharashtra too can do that," she said. The Indian Express article, for its part, gave Katkar's contrary position that the state lacked the authority. These two claims are set against each other here as reported, and the record does not decide which is correct as a matter of law.
A different kind of review had come in October 2017. The Times of India reported on an independent fact-finding team of farmer rights groups and farm experts, which visited affected blocks of Yavatmal on October 9 and 10 and produced a 19-page report. It pointed to loopholes in the ground-level monitoring of the sale and use of pesticides in the district and blamed both state and central governments for overlooking systemic failure. It noted that many of the pesticides involved had been reviewed by a central committee in the past, which had recommended their continuation. Kuruganti, who was part of the team, said the report was sent to the Union agriculture minister Radha Mohan Singh and to Chief Minister Fadnavis, asking for specific actions from both.
The Indian Express's June 2018 report also summarises the SIT's causes in its own words. It lists the extra height of the crop and the narrower spacing between rows, which led to spraying at head level, the use of fine-holed automatic sprayers that created a mist of fumes instead of droplets, daylong spraying by labourers with few breaks, and the failure to provide proper protective gear. It says the report faulted non-implementation of a mandatory provision of the Insecticides Act, the filing of regular reports on pesticide usage and poisoning incidents.
The report's strongest language, as the paper quotes it, was about the administration's own gaps. "No action was taken against sale of non-recommended pesticides in the affected areas by agriculture department officials," it said. "One quality control inspector has to cover 16 tahsils in Yavatmal. That post, too, has been vacant for the past two years and the job is left to a tahsil agriculture officer as additional charge." The paper quoted the report as saying that only six of 16 tahsil agriculture officer posts in the district were filled. This is the same gap PARI reported in January, in the same terms, and the two articles agree on the vacant inspector's post.
By the second half of 2018 the state was claiming a result. The Indian Express published a long report on Monday, November 19, 2018 under the headline "From 22 deaths to 0". It said that in July and August, officials said, at least 28,000 safety kits of masks, gloves and synthetic aprons had been distributed free in Yavatmal. Last year, 22 deaths were reported from Yavatmal, it said, and this year official figures showed a clean slate in the district, where cotton covered 4.5 lakh hectares. The 22 here is a third Yavatmal figure alongside the 21 in the state's counts and the Hindu feature's 21, and the paper does not say why it differs.
Officials credited their drive. Katkar said that "Maharashtra used to witness 30 to 60 deaths of farmers on an average every year due to overexposure to pesticides" and called the two deaths of 2018 in the state a landmark in disaster management. Official figures, the paper said, showed 507 patient admissions from Yavatmal in 2017 against 116 in 2018, and the two deaths in the state, in Telhara tehsil of Akola and Hinganghat tehsil of Wardha, were outside Yavatmal. The District Collector, Rajesh Deshmukh, said dedicated wards and staff had been opened in government facilities.
The 507 admissions in that report do not match the other 2017 hospital counts. The dean told The Hindu 472 over three months, the Down To Earth interview gave 479 referred since July, and the PARI account said over 1,000 became sick. The official figure may cover a different period or a different definition, and the report does not say. Each is attributed to its owner here.
The paper did not stop at the officials' account. According to the Express reporters, who travelled across Yavatmal for a week, a large dip in attacks by pink bollworm was a key factor, and farmers still had unresolved problems. Workers said many of them had not yet received their kits from farm owners, and others had not felt any compulsion to use them. At Dahegaon in Ghatanji tehsil, three workers who had been admitted to the Yavatmal medical college for 15 days the previous year had very different habits: only one of them, Gajanan Chikram, used protection of any kind, a handkerchief tied around his face, while the other two had avoided spraying duty altogether.
Officials named two steps in their campaign. One was preventing seeds from entering the market before May 26, so that sowing happened more or less together instead of from late May to late June, which in the officials' account had produced a cascading pattern of flowering that helped pink bollworm. The other was the two-month ban on the pesticides of the 2017 "deadly cocktail". Katkar added that 33 police cases were registered against companies, dealers and individuals under the Insecticides Act in 2018 against two the year before, and that farmers had done 8 to 10 sprays against 15-odd the previous year. Those figures are the department's, as quoted.
The activist Vijay Jawandhia gave the contrary reading in the same article: "The credit goes to nature because there were hardly any bollworm attacks this year." Vijay Kadu of the Ghatanji NGO Dilasa endorsed the government's efforts with a warning: "Manufacturers add to the potency of pesticides to achieve maximum effect... if the system becomes lax again, we could see the tragedy staging a comeback next year." Where sources differ, the Express itself presented both the officials' explanation and the pest-pressure explanation, without choosing.
The "zero" was a claim about one district. The Business Standard's report on the same season, republished by The Quint on Saturday, October 20, 2018, described three poisoning deaths in eastern Maharashtra in the two months of August and September 2018. They were Rushi Madavi, 55, of Chak Mankapur in Chandrapur district, who sprayed on August 26, 2018, a Sunday, and died that night in Gadchiroli (the report's caption says August 27), Kumdeo Gurnule, 35, of Akapur in Sawali taluka, who died on September 13, 2018, and Vijay Sardar, 32, of Dahigaon in Akola, who died on August 12, 2018. None of the three was in Yavatmal. The same report gave 135 Yavatmal farmers in hospital since July 2018 after accidental exposure, according to district health office records, which is not a death count and does not contradict the "zero" for deaths.
The report is unusually specific about what the Madavi family and neighbours said. Rekha Madavi, 45, did not know the name of the pesticide her husband had been spraying, and the police had seized all the containers. A neighbour, Srikrishna Gedam, said it was the same "mono" insecticide everyone in the village sprayed on cotton. The death certificate, which the youngest son Bhimrao, 25, showed the reporters, read "Acute respiratory distress syndrome due to insecticidal poisoning, with hypotension and severe anaemia". The report says Madavi was allegedly spraying monocrotophos, which the World Health Organization classifies as highly hazardous.
The reporters found that the commonly used brand in that village was Monostar, a monocrotophos product that Maharashtra had banned for two months in 2017 and that was still commonly used by cotton farmers. They also found that safety kits were not available in adequate numbers at the village stores, that the government's instruction pamphlets did not reach all farmers, that containers were sold without measuring cups, and that unregistered pesticides, including one called Humica, were available, which would violate the Insecticides Act. These are the reporters' findings from one taluka and from interviews, and they are not a survey. The farmers told them the use of monocrotophos was unavoidable, at least in the first cycle of pest control for cotton.
The pink bollworm remained the background to all of it. Mongabay India reported in August 2018 on Sanjay Rathod of Lasina village in Yavatmal, who on August 10, a Friday, opened closed yellow flowers on his cotton and found the tiny larvae of the pink bollworm. He shared a photograph on WhatsApp groups, got advice on what to spray, used Larvin and neem spray, and saw no effect. The next day district officers found the attack not serious and below the economic threshold level, and an associate director of research at the Akola agricultural university, Pramod Yadgiriwar, called it "a healthy field". Rathod was unconvinced, since the scientists had not checked the whole field.
That small exchange captures what the "22 deaths to 0" story cannot. The state could point to fewer sprays, kits and a ban, and farmers could point to a pest that had or had not returned. In 2018 the answer to the second question depended on rain, sowing dates and luck, and the next three years of the story moved to a different kind of record: the laboratory findings and legal complaints of a Swiss NGO and its partners.
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