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A court, a sealed envelope and the Rs 4 lakh

Published 7 October 2026

The Rs 2 lakh the chief minister announced was never the last word on money. The question went to the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court, where a public interest petition by the social worker Jammu Anand, argued through the lawyer Arvind Waghmare, had been pending since the autumn. The Times of India reported on Wednesday, January 10, 2018 that the bench had orally asked the government why it was "suppressing" the report of the SIT, which the paper described as probing 44 farmer deaths from pesticide inhalation. Where sources differ, the same paper's later report says the bench rapped the government on Thursday, so reports give two different days for the hearing.

The bench was Justices Bhushan Dharmadhikari and Swapna Joshi. According to the paper, they refused to give the government pleader extra time to take instructions and directed him to file a reply by Friday. They said: "When assurance was given in October to make SIT report public within three weeks, why hasn't it come till date?" They added that the pleader should have called the concerned authorities that day, taken details about the report and made a statement then. These are the paper's quotations of oral remarks, not the text of an order.

The petition, as the paper described it, cited several media reports including the Times of India's own. It said over 700 other farmers had been admitted to hospitals across Vidarbha with respiratory problems and about 25 to 30 had lost their eyesight, which it blamed on failure to implement the Insecticides Act, 1968. It prayed for directions to the government to compensate the families of the dead, and the paper's text breaks off at the amount. The petitioners also pointed out that the respondents had neglected provisions of the Act, and the paper noted that it had reported on December 24 that the SIT report was not ready.

On Friday, January 12, 2018, the government complied in a limited way. The Times of India reported that the Maharashtra government submitted the SIT's report to the court in a sealed envelope, through additional government pleader Anand Fulzele, who said it was yet to be tabled before the state cabinet. The bench directed the government to complete all the formalities within a week. Fulzele said the report was not fully complete because the home department, headed by the chief minister, had yet to give its opinion, though the government had taken opinions from all its other departments.

Waghmare, in the same report, accused the government of deliberately delaying the report though it had said it would be done within three weeks of the SIT's formation. The paper gives that date as October 13. Where sources differ, PARI gave October 10, 2017 for the constitution of the team, and Waghmare's date in the Times of India is October 13. The record treats the difference as unresolved because neither article cites the government order.

The same report describes the government's affidavits. The chief secretary and agriculture department secretary filed a common affidavit through the Pune-based agriculture commissioner, Sachindra Singh, listing measures taken to prevent more deaths, while Singh and the Yavatmal collector filed their own affidavits. According to the paper, both secretaries called the deaths a "menace" and blamed local authorities for "lack of coordination" at the initial stage, which they said was "a point for concern". They also ruled out ignorance on implementation of the Insecticides Act and the Insecticides Rules, 1971, and said that prolonged exposure to pesticides and failure to take protective measures were apparent major reasons for the toxicity.

That position matches the SIT's published findings. It differs from the position of the petitioners and of the farm distress task force, which placed more weight on the products, the sellers and the regulators. The court, in the reports available here, did not decide between these positions in January. It asked for the report and asked for it to be made public, and PARI recorded that it was made public in January 2018.

The money came next. A Nagpur Today report and a Lokmat report, both dated February 22, 2018, carry the headline that the High Court had ordered Rs 4 lakh rather than Rs 2 lakh for families of farmers who died from pesticide spraying. The Nagpur Today report, in Hindi, carries the headline "Rs 4 lakh compensation to the families of dead farmers from pesticide spraying." The text of that article that the record could retrieve is only its headline, so the detail comes from the Times of India reports below.

The Times of India's later report, dated Monday, November 4, 2019, says the state doubled compensation for pesticide inhalation deaths from Rs 2 lakh to Rs 4 lakh following directives of the Nagpur bench. It says the state's revenue and forest department issued a notification on Monday approving Rs 36 lakh for the families of nine people who died after inhaling pesticide "last year", which is 2018. The paper listed six of the nine as from Vidarbha: Vijay Sardar and Himmat Karwate of Akola, Kailash Menghre of Nagpur, Khushal Deshmukh and Mangesh Nikure of Chandrapur, and Bharat Khajariya of Gondia. The other three were from Jalgaon.

The arithmetic is the paper's own: nine families at Rs 4 lakh each is Rs 36 lakh. The paper says the government had started giving Rs 2 lakh for pesticide inhalation deaths treating it as a special case, and that the High Court, hearing the public interest petition in February 2018, had directed the government to increase it to Rs 4 lakh. It adds that in 2017 the state recorded over 60 pesticide inhalation deaths, with the most in Yavatmal, that there were reportedly no deaths in 2018, and that three deaths had been registered in September 2019 from Akola and Buldhana. The "no deaths in 2018" claim conflicts with the nine families the same paper says were compensated for 2018 deaths, and with the August and September 2018 deaths in Chandrapur and Akola reported in the Business Standard. Where sources differ, the notification's nine names are the more specific record, and the "reportedly" in the paper's sentence marks its own caution.

A third piece shows how the money reached families, and how unevenly. The Times of India reported on Thursday, March 29, 2018 that the kin of nearly 40 victims who died between August and October 2017 and were missed out of the government aid would get compensation only then. The Rs 2 lakh announced by Chief Minister Fadnavis, it said, was quickly distributed in Yavatmal district, but many in other districts were left out, according to sources.

The distribution, as the paper's sources described it, had a clear geography. Those in Yavatmal would now get another Rs 2 lakh, while others would get the enhanced Rs 4 lakh directly. Kin in districts other than Yavatmal had not received even the compensation first announced. A meeting was held by the chief secretary on implementing the court order that week, with directions for district collectors to submit proposals for payment through the chief minister's relief fund. The paper said the sources also put the state's total at over 63 deaths from pesticide inhalation in the entire state, of which 20-odd were from Yavatmal.

Kishor Tiwari gave the explanation in that report: other districts remained neglected because no voice was raised, and district administration officials should have acted promptly. This is his view as quoted, and the paper offers no statement from the officials he criticised. The paper also noted the petitioner's dissatisfaction with the SIT report, which did not name any official responsible for the disaster, and said the petitioner had sought a CBI inquiry. It reported that the court had enhanced the compensation, directed the state to have a uniform policy for announcing compensation, and given the kin the right to sue the concerned state officers if they found the enhanced compensation insufficient.

Three counts appear in these court-related reports, and they are not the same thing. The 44 deaths are the number the Times of India attached to the SIT's inquiry in January 2018. The over 63 deaths are an unnamed state government source's count for the whole state, in March 2018. The over 60 in 2017 is the paper's own figure in November 2019. Each is listed for its owner and date, and none is added to another. The 20-odd for Yavatmal, from the March 2018 source, sits near the Hindu feature's 21 for the end of November 2017 and well below the 50 that PARI counted for the season, which suggests different definitions, though none of the reports states the definition used.

The table lays out the money as the reports give it.

What the money did and did not do is not recorded in these reports. They show a sum announced in a week, a sum raised by a court within five months, and a payment gap that took until the following spring to start closing, with the families outside Yavatmal waiting longest. They do not show whether the court's right to sue officers was ever used. That question, and the larger one of who bore responsibility, passed to different forums in the years that followed.

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