Retailers, bans and the regulatory gap
Published 7 October 2026
The first people charged in Yavatmal were not officials or manufacturers. They were shopkeepers. By Friday, October 13, 2017, Firstpost reported, Yavatmal police had registered a case against "yet another retailer" for selling pesticides without a licence. An FIR was lodged against the owner of Vaibhav Krishi Kendra at Wadki in Ralegaon, the report said, on the complaint of the tehsil agriculture officer under the Pesticides Act, 1974 as the report cites it. With this case, it said, the number of cases for unauthorised sale had reached nine.
The same Firstpost report carries the district's own tallies on that Friday, and they are useful because they carry an owner. District officials, it said, put the death toll from poisoning during spraying at 19. Five more patients had been admitted to the government medical college hospital, taking the number of such patients in treatment to 26. And compensation of Rs 2 lakh each had been paid to the families of 15 deceased farmers, with the rest to be paid after autopsy reports arrived and the causes of death were confirmed. These are district-official figures on October 13, 2017, and they are lower than the Congress's 22 deaths and 750 affected, quoted four days later in The Hindu, which came from a party on a march.
The retailers had defended themselves from the start. a Ghatanji shop owner told The Hindu that there had been no change in the ingredients and that shops displayed boards on precautions. The district's response, in The Hindu's account of the month, was to book five Krishi Kendra owners for "selling unauthorised pesticides" and to send agriculture officers to create awareness. The Hindu quoted experts as saying the action came late. Joint director Subhash Nagare, quoted by The Wire, said the department had closed 47 service centres for not following the rules.
Behind the retail cases was a bigger question about what could legally be sold. Scroll's report on the Indian regulatory system said India had approved around 280 pesticide molecules, at least 99 of which were banned in other countries, according to activists who filed a public interest litigation in the Supreme Court in November. The registration process under the Insecticides Act of 1968, it said, had led to about 2.5 lakh pesticide products being cleared although only 280 molecules were registered, citing a 2016 parliamentary standing committee report. It cited a 2015 FICCI-TATA Strategic Management Group estimate that spurious, misbranded or unregistered pesticides accounted for 25 percent of the value of the Rs 27,000 crore agrochemical industry.
Scroll also reported that the Maharashtra inquiry had found that the vague legal definition of "insecticide" meant herbicides and plant growth stimulators went largely unregulated, and that companies had used the gap to flood the market with unregistered products. It added that the Centre had announced a draft Pesticides Management Bill in December to replace the Insecticides Act. Those are Scroll's descriptions of the law and the state's findings, and the report ties them to the question of whether the Bill could prevent deaths of the kind seen in 2017.
The Scroll piece did not stay in Maharashtra. It opened with Raja, a woodcutter in Perambalur district, Tamil Nadu, who had leased half an acre to grow cotton for the first time in 2017. On the morning of October 24 he sprayed 10 to 15 tanks, came home dizzy, vomited, and was taken to hospital at 3:30 the next morning, where doctors said they could do nothing. His wife Meenakshi told Scroll he had worn a suit and a mask. Eight other cotton farmers in Tamil Nadu died over the next three months in similar ways, their families said, while the state agriculture department acknowledged only two deaths in an answer to Scroll's Right to Information application. Two deaths were reported in Telangana. The paper put the highest numbers in Maharashtra, with more than 40 deaths in Vidarbha.
That Scroll account sets the Maharashtra team's finding beside the Tamil Nadu case. It says the team reported that farmers who died had not taken precautions, had failed to cover their mouths and wear protective suits while spraying cotton that had grown unusually high, and it then contrasts that with Raja's case, where the family said he wore protective gear. The Scroll piece does not claim to resolve the difference. It records both and moves to the system around them: dealers who do not offer reliable advice, and a government farm extension system that barely functions.
The state's first regulatory move was a ban, and it was narrow. On Friday, October 20, 2017, according to Firstpost citing the Hindustan Times, the state was considering a 60-day ban on five pesticides. They were profenophos 40 percent with cypermethrin 4 percent, fipronil 40 percent with imidacloprid 40 percent, acephate 75 percent, diafenthiuron 50 percent and monocrotophos 36 percent. The report said the agriculture department had invited suggestions and objections before implementing the order. The Firstpost piece, dated October 21, 2017, counted over 30 farmers dead in Yavatmal and adjoining districts, and described the five as the pesticides "under the scanner". Among them are the active ingredients of Profex Super and of Polo, the two products named in the earliest reports.
Experts doubted it would work. Paromita Goswami, a tribal activist in Chandrapur district, told Firstpost the ban would not work because people on the ground were not aware which pesticides would be banned, and that a limited period did not deter farmers from using them again once it ended. She wanted a complete withdrawal, with the products seized and disposed of. Akshay Chakravarthy, an entomologist at the Indian Institute of Horticultural Research, said the government should ban them for at least six months, run a pilot study on the affected plots and then decide.
A longer view came from Down To Earth's November report. Its article "Vidarbha's toxic trail" said some 35 farmers in the region had died of pesticide poisoning in the last four months, most of them working in cotton and soybean fields, with the toll highest in Yavatmal, where 18 farmers died between July and the first week of November. The count of 18 here is a different number from Firstpost's 19 for mid-October and from the Hindu feature's 21 for the end of November. Where sources differ, each is quoted for its own date and owner and none is summed.
The same Down To Earth report records the hospital's view from early November. B S Yelke, head of the medicine department at the Yavatmal medical college, told the magazine on November 2 that some 479 poisoning cases had been referred to the hospital since July, that ten patients were then under treatment and that three were critical, with one on ventilator support. His 479 sits close to the dean's 472 reported a month earlier by The Hindu, and both are hospital counts, in contrast with the larger district or activist figures.
The report adds a human detail from Sawargaon village in Kalamb block, where Prateeksha Fulmali, 20, said her father had died on October 1. "Why does the government allow the use of such pesticides that are potentially lethal for people?" she asked. That question is the regulatory story in one line, and the magazine turned to the rules. It reported that in 2013 the Union agriculture ministry had set up an expert committee under Anupam Verma to review 66 pesticides that were banned in several countries but used in India, that the committee reviewed 11 of the 18 Class I pesticides registered in India, and that the ministry had proposed to ban three Class I pesticides from 2018 and four more from 2021. Neither monocrotophos nor oxydemeton-methyl was on that list, the magazine wrote.
Down To Earth also pointed to an international standard. It quoted the 2014 International Code of Conduct on Pesticide Management, released jointly by the FAO and the WHO, which says pesticides whose handling requires personal protective equipment that is uncomfortable, expensive or not readily available should be avoided, especially for small-scale users and farm workers in hot climates. The magazine quoted an expert, Jayakumar, as saying Maharashtra's case highlighted violation of that code. The expert's view is cited as his own. Down To Earth added that unapproved use, spraying a pesticide on a crop for which it is not permitted, remained a problem.
Scroll's earlier report from Vidarbha, written during the outbreak, set the agronomic scene. It reported that pest attacks on cotton and soyabean were higher than usual, that sucking pests such as the mealy bug and the pink bollworm had damaged vast tracts, and that, according to Kishore Tiwari, all 40 lakh hectares of cotton in Maharashtra had been affected, which forced more spraying. It also said the Central Institute for Cotton Research had detected herbicide-tolerant genes in the Bt cotton seeds of five companies. It counted at least 40 poisoning deaths in six Vidarbha districts, with Yavatmal alone accounting for at least 22 and over 800 people affected. Those are Scroll's figures, with Tiwari's attribution for the area under attack.
One case in that Scroll report is worth the space. It describes Ankush Rathod, 22, whose eyes were still foggy more than a month after he came home from hospital. He could not see clearly, his eyes were reddish and had a vacant look, he had to put in eye drops daily and visit a private hospital every week, and he said he could not see anything while his eyes burned. His case is a reminder that the counts are of deaths, and that the injured are counted mostly as admissions.
Taken together, the autumn of 2017 left three separate lines of argument. One was about conduct, where retailers had been booked and farmers faulted for not protecting themselves. One was about the products, where five were put under a time-limited ban. The third was about the law itself, which several reporters and experts described as permitting too many products and too little supervision. The SIT, whose report is covered next, would have to choose between them.
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