Inside the SIT report
Published 7 October 2026
The state's answer to the deaths was a committee. According to the Rural India Online account of the report, written for PARI, the SIT was constituted on Tuesday, October 10, 2017, and headed by Piyush Singh, the Amravati divisional commissioner. Its six other members included Dr Vijay Waghmare, in-charge director of the Central Institute for Cotton Research in Nagpur, and Kiran Deshkar of the Directorate of Plant Protection at Faridabad. The Hindu, writing in October 2017, had described the team as seven members with three weeks to report. Where sources differ, it is on the date of the team: The Hindu's October report of the team gave no order date, and PARI gives October 10, which the record uses for the formal order, with October 3 as the date of the chief minister's announcement.
Three weeks did not become three weeks. The Times of India reported on Friday, December 22, 2017, that Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, speaking after the end of the winter session of the legislature, said the SIT report was not ready and that more inquiry was needed before it could be made public. The paper said that despite an assurance from agriculture minister Pandurang Phundkar, the government had not tabled the report. It counted 44 people dead from inhaling pesticides in Vidarbha in the previous couple of months, as the paper's own figure.
The officials gave their reasons in the same article. Bijoy Kumar, the principal secretary of the state agriculture department, said the report would be finalised only after all concerned departments went through it and marked their observations. Phundkar told the paper the report was under the chief minister's consideration and that only he would make it public. Fadnavis said there was no need to table it in the Assembly because the government had made no assurance to do so. He said the report was "still inconclusive" and that viscera samples had been sent for further testing.
The chief minister also said in that article that seed companies must provide compensation as per law, that there was no need to seek their consent, and that FIRs had already been lodged against them. He said the government had received over 8.5 lakh complaints against seed companies. That figure concerns seed complaints in general and is not a count of the pesticide deaths. The Times of India piece carries it in the same exchange, and it is quoted here only with that attribution.
Kishor Tiwari, chairman of the farm distress task force, gave a contrary view. In the same report he said Piyush Singh had submitted the report to the government on Monday, November 27, 2017. "As per my sources," he said, the report pinned the blame for the deaths on seed companies and government officials, and the companies and farm activists had approached the SIT earlier to be heard. He said the government should have made the report public as there was nothing confidential in it. Tiwari's account of the report's contents is his own and was not confirmed by the document when it became public, as the next paragraphs show. PARI places the submission in December 2017, so the November 27 date from Tiwari and the December date from PARI differ and neither can be settled from the reports.
The report did become public, but only because a court asked. PARI's account says the report, written in Marathi, was made public only after the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court asked the government to do so in January 2018 while hearing a public interest litigation filed by social activist and former CPI(M) worker Jammu Anand. The same account is dated Saturday, January 27, 2018. On the other side, The Hindu's report, based on a copy of the 56-page document it said it had obtained, appeared in early 2018 under the headline that the SIT blamed farmers for negligence.
What the report said about causes was, in The Hindu's telling, direct. It quoted the SIT as blaming farmers and farm labourers for "their failure to follow safety measures" and calling the deaths "a man-made disaster". The Hindu's count for the season was 21 farmers and farm labourers dead and around 1,000 infected in Yavatmal between August and November 2017. The SIT's reasoning, as quoted, was that cotton plants grew 1.5 feet taller, to around six feet, because of a lack of rain in June, July and August of 2017, that humidity had increased, that the crop was dense, and that pest attacks and the weather led to more spraying.
The report's finding on spraying practice is specific. It said those spraying had to lift pumps above their height and so inhaled particles, that pesticides should be sprayed in the morning or evening but spraying was found to be done from 9 am to 6 pm and on consecutive days, and that humidity was 10 percent higher the previous year. It added that most of the affected farmers and labourers sprayed without covering their upper body or mouth. It blamed the local Krishi Seva Kendras and farmers for "cheaper and unscientific mixtures of pesticides" that increased concentration, and said high-volume spraying pumps, common in Yavatmal, contributed to more than normal use.
The Hindu reported two recommendations. The SIT recommended a ban on monocrotophos and asked regulating authorities not to give a licence for the sale of any chemical for which antidotes are not available. In The Hindu's report both sat inside a document whose headline finding was about farmers' conduct.
PARI's reading of the same report is longer and sets out what else it contained. The PARI article says the SIT observed that the district administration had not communicated the gravity and scale of the disaster to the state government. It says the Insecticides Act, 1968 requires a permanent inter-departmental committee to be constituted in each district, with a monitoring team to keep track of whether farmers, dealers and manufacturers follow the law, to ensure antidotes are available for the pesticides sold, and to coordinate a quick response in a crisis, and that no such committee or monitoring mechanism existed in Yavatmal.
On treatment, PARI reported that the Yavatmal medical college could not perform the cholinesterase test, the blood test that detects organophosphate poisoning, and lacked the antidote. A doctor in the intensive care unit told PARI that for several weeks doctors treated patients symptomatically and that crucial blood tests were not done at all. The report's recommendation, PARI said, was that the hospital be equipped to perform the test and stock the medicines, and that it get a separate 30-bed ICU, with a 20-bed ICU in the Akola district hospital and ICUs at the sub-district hospitals at Wani and Pusad. It also recommended a state-of-the-art toxicology laboratory at the Yavatmal medical college, and noted that the health authorities did not send blood samples for toxicology tests immediately.
The Amravati hospital, according to PARI's reading of the SIT report, handled the 2017 crisis better because it could perform the cholinesterase test and stocked antidotes. This is a finding about how the same crisis was managed in two government hospitals, and it matters for the later argument about who was responsible for deaths in the ward at Yavatmal. The PARI article attributes the finding to the SIT, and does not give figures for deaths in Amravati.
PARI said the SIT also recommended a complete ban on monocrotophos, an organophosphate banned in many countries. It wrote that the Maharashtra government complied with a limited-period ban in November, prohibiting its sale and marketing for 60 days, but did not enforce a complete ban, and that only the central government has the power to ban the chemical nationally under the Insecticides Act. It noted that states can suspend or stop issuing licences, that Punjab decided at the end of January 2018 not to issue fresh licences for 20 pesticides including monocrotophos, that Kerala had banned it earlier, and that Sikkim, a fully organic state, does not allow any chemical pesticide.
The 60-day ban's date also differs between sources. Firstpost reported on October 21, 2017 that the state "may" ban five pesticides for 60 days after inviting objections, and PARI says the state complied with a limited-period ban "in November" on monocrotophos. The two are not the same measure: the Firstpost list had five products and PARI's sentence is about monocrotophos. The record does not assume the November order covered all five.
PARI also reported what it called the report's silences and its more technical findings. It says the SIT found farmers used synthetic pyrethroids, organophosphates and other next-generation pesticides along with plant growth promoters such as gibberellic acid, indole acetic acid and indole butyric acid, and some unapproved chemicals such as humic acid and nitrobenzene. Many farmers used a combination of fipronil and imidacloprid brands that were not approved, it said, and local markets were flush with imported, ready-to-use chemicals. It reported that Yavatmal has 16 talukas but one post of district quality control inspector, vacant for two years.
PARI's own judgment appears in the same piece. It wrote that the report "largely pins the blame on farmers and farm labourers" but also says that hidden in it was the observation that the 2017 pest attack on cotton was unprecedented, especially the return of the pink bollworm, and that the report does not mention the breakdown of the agriculture extension system. That criticism is PARI's and is attributed to its writer. The SIT's own quoted line, per PARI, was that "the concentration of new formulations of pesticides and other chemicals increased the toxicity and the possibility of inhalation and contact poisoning in extremely humid conditions."
PARI's count of the toll is a different number again. It wrote that at least 50 died and over 1,000 became sick, some for months, drawing on hospital data and doctors' accounts, and pointed to the union agriculture ministry's reply to the Lok Sabha on March 6, reportedly of 272 pesticide poisoning deaths in Maharashtra in four years. PARI argued that this implied the 2017 wave was not unusual but that hospital data showed Yavatmal had never seen accidental pesticide poisoning on that scale. The 50 and the 272 are different scopes, one for the 2017 season in Vidarbha as PARI counted it and the other a four-year state total reported by the ministry, and the record does not compare them as a rate.
The challenge to the report came within weeks. PARI said that on Tuesday, February 6, 2018, Nagpur lawyer Arvind Waghmare petitioned the Nagpur bench asking for a second SIT to fix blame on the government for lapses in containing the crisis and on the companies that sell the compounds. The petition is a prayer in a case, and the available record in the record does not show how the court responded to it. It does show where the next argument would come from: not the state's own report but the people who read it and saw different conclusions.
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