A fact-finding team disputes the height explanation
Published 7 October 2026
While the state's committee was still being constituted, a group of civil society organisations went to Yavatmal to check the official account for themselves. Their report, dated October 12, 2017, was written by a team from the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), Dharamitra, Chetna Organic and the Nagpur Beejotsav Group. Its members were Kavitha Kuruganti, Rahul Bole, Swati Sagare, Shankar Amilkanthavar, Karthikeyan Hemalatha and Sahebrao Namdevrao Parode. The team said it was describing mainly what it saw in Yavatmal and that the situation there could be surmised to some extent for other districts. The date of the report, Thursday, October 12, 2017, falls three days after the NHRC notice.
The team's own counts, which it attributed to the hospital and the agriculture department, were specific and narrower than the headlines. It wrote that in Yavatmal 11 deaths took place in the district hospital and seven in various rural hospitals, which gives 18 in the district on the team's figures. From July 2017, 438 patients with inhalation poisoning had been admitted to the district hospital, including 23 who were in the hospital when the team visited, and three were on ventilators. These are the owners' figures as the team recorded them on a particular date, and they sit between the dean's 472 over three months and the NHRC-era reports of 600 or more affected.
The team also reported an older baseline. It wrote that cases in the department of medicine at the Yavatmal medical college were related to pesticide poisoning in both inhalation and ingestion forms, and that of 1,278 patients, 274 were affected by inhalation poisoning and 158 by ingestion. It called that "a matter of great alarm to everyone". The sentence does not say which period the 1,278 covers, and the report's text as retrieved here does not give it, so the figure is an example of how the team read the hospital's records and not a count of the 2017 season.
Firstpost's series on the deaths explained why such baselines were thin. Its third part, by Karthikeyan Hemalatha, who was also a member of the fact-finding team, said officials at the district agriculture department and the medical college handed out printed sheets listing the deaths from inhalation over the last two months, with the names, whether victims worked their own or another's land, the crops and even the type of sprayer. It said this level of accounting began only in 2016, after a tragedy that claimed six lives, when 176 others were admitted. The head of medicine, Dr B S Yelke, told the series that the phenomenon was "certainly not new to Yavatmal" but that "we do not have the data to show the trend over the years".
Dr Yelke explained why in the same piece: treatment of ingestion and inhalation is the same, so it is not possible to go back to treatment reports to separate them. The series added national data. The National Crime Records Bureau had a broad category called accidental intake of insecticides and pesticides, with 7,672 cases and 7,060 deaths recorded across India in 2015, led by Madhya Pradesh with 1,368 deaths and Maharashtra with 1,042. C Jayakumar of the Pesticide Action Network told the series that inhalation and ingestion should be classified separately because they need different policy responses, and asked how a state could develop policy without knowing the size of the problem.
The fact-finding team's most direct challenge was to the explanation about the height of the crop. The team wrote that it drove at least 275 kilometres along roads lined with cotton, with members getting down to assess the height of the crop, and found that the cotton was not everywhere or even mostly overgrown that season. Villagers disagreed with the claim as well, it said, putting growth at around four feet in many fields and not very different from other seasons. The team concluded that higher plant growth could not be the main explanation. This is a field observation by an advocacy coalition, and it differs from the SIT's later finding that the plants grew about 1.5 feet taller to around six feet. Where sources differ, the two claims were made about different samples of fields and neither source published measurements in the extracts available.
The team also questioned the line that farmers had failed to protect themselves. It wrote that in at least two of the cases it visited, safety measures including a helmet and overalls were in use and the poisoning still occurred. It said that the chief minister had announced a ban on Chinese-made battery-operated power sprayers, which appeared dangerous for inhalation, but that in six of the 18 deaths, including two of the three the team visited, old-style hand-operated sprayers had been used. Those are the team's case observations from three family visits, and the report does not claim they are representative.
On who died, the team gave a count by relationship to the land. It wrote that in only six of the 18 death cases in Yavatmal was the victim spraying in his own field, and that in the remaining cases it was mostly agricultural workers, who might or might not have some land of their own. In eight cases the victims depended only on agricultural labour. The team said spraying wages were similar to other farm work, which differs from the Indian Express's Rs 350 against Rs 250. Where sources differ, the Express quoted workers and the team reported its own interviews, and the report gives no wage table.
The team described a piece-rate system in Arni block. Workers use hired power sprayers, it wrote, and share wages with the sprayer owners, who spent around Rs 5,500 per machine. At Rs 25 per tank sprayed, Rs 15 goes to the worker and Rs 10 to the owner. That arithmetic is consistent with the Rs 5,500 pump that Vinod Dhanke told The Hindu he was selling for Rs 2,000, though the two reports do not refer to each other. In one case the team met a poisoned man who had worked two shifts a day to earn about Rs 500.
Mixing was central to the team's reading of causes. It wrote that in all cases of poisoning deaths in Yavatmal combinations or mixtures of pesticides had been used, and that farmers explained they wanted to deal with several issues in one go, given the cost and time of multiple sprays. On cotton that season, it said, they found sucking pests and bollworm and wanted also to boost growth with a growth promoter or make the crop look better with a chemical like monocrotophos. In some cases farmers were advised by dealers and in others they invented mixtures of two or three chemicals themselves. The team wrote that end-use regulation at the farmer level was "simply not possible".
The team listed the products from the agriculture department's list of deaths, with the department's note of what each contained: Profex Super as profenofos with cypermethrin, Phoskill and Monocil as monocrotophos, Polo as diafenthiuron, and Police as fipronil with imidacloprid. It wrote that numerous brands of various companies were implicated, with organophosphates, phenylpyrazoles, synthetic pyrethroids, carbamates and neonicotinoids in combination products. This is the earliest document in this record to list Polo by name among the products the department itself recorded for deaths, though PAN India's team, visiting the next day, listed it as well.
On enforcement, the team wrote that only in October 2017 had five blood samples of affected persons been sent to Pune for forensic testing, that no samples of the dead had been tested, and that seven FIRs had been lodged, mainly against dealers but also against two pesticide companies. The companies it named, citing agriculture department officials it met, were Gharda Chemicals and United Phosphorus Limited, though it noted Syngenta was mentioned in some media reports. Those are the team's reports of what officials told it, and the companies' responses are not in the report.
It also pointed to the testing system's limits. Experience from 2009 to 2010 through 2015 to 2016, it wrote, showed that of around 875 samples collected and analysed by the part-time insecticide inspectors, only 24 failed, or 2.7 percent. The team argued that individual samples might pass while the danger lay in combinations and mixtures that no test addressed. The argument was the team's, and the figures are attributed to department experience as the team described it.
The team's criticism of institutions was broad and attributed to the team. It wrote that no department had taken cognisance of the matter despite years of experience of acute poisoning, that the medical college had not built surveillance systems, that the police had not considered they had a role until FIRs were filed, and that the health department did not appear to treat poisoning at that scale as a public health problem. It added that the state had not revoked licences of dangerous pesticides, citing Kerala and Sikkim as examples of tighter rules, and that the central regulator allowed combination products. The team concluded there could be "no safe use of these pesticides" in the conditions it saw and urged removal of toxic pesticides. That is its position, as an advocacy coalition, and officials' replies are not part of the document.
The team noted procedural dates that match other sources. It said the state had created an SIT only in October 2017, after an initial order in September for a high-level panel headed by the additional chief secretary (home), Sudhir Srivastava, which agrees with the Times of India's account of an inquiry under that office. It said the High Court had sent notices to the state agriculture secretary, the agriculture commissioner and the Yavatmal collector directing replies before October 30. And it said the NHRC had asked within four weeks for the steps taken to prevent recurrence, treatment at no cost, and details of compensation and action against guilty officers, which is the same list .
The Times of India's report of the team's findings, published in the national edition, led with the question of why there was no ban despite the central review. It said a 19-page report found loopholes in the monitoring of sale and use, and quoted Kuruganti on sending the report to the Union agriculture minister and the chief minister. The headline question the paper put was the team's own. Its sharpest point was that many of the pesticides involved had been reviewed by the central committee led by Anupam Verma, which had recommended their continuation, and that the committee had not reviewed glyphosate.
The report was a competing reading written within days of the NHRC notice and before the SIT's findings: on the crop height, on whether farmers were careless, on mixtures and on data. The SIT would reach a different conclusion on the first two and a similar one on mixtures, as its report showed.
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