What the villages report now
Published 7 October 2026
The most recent documents in this record are not about courts. They are about what farmers in Yavatmal say they spray, what they wear, and how they feel afterwards. The first is The Hindu's report of Saturday, December 23, 2023, which went to Borisinh village, 40 km from Yavatmal town, and found farmers still living with the consequences of 2017. It described Hiraman Sayam, 45, who said he woke up breathless and restless, then had fits and seizures, shivering that turned cold, and had to be tied to a cot with a rope and a sari before relatives took him to a primary health centre in Akola Bazaar and from there to the Yavatmal medical college.
According to the report, Sayam had sprayed an insecticide named Polo on a seller's recommendation that it would increase his cotton yield. His wife Archana said a private hospital cost Rs 1,16,000, of which Rs 50,000 was still unpaid, that his monthly medical expense was Rs 3,000, and that the couple's two children had dropped out of school because of money. The report's names are close to those in Public Eye's 2018 account of Hiroman Soyam and his wife Archana, who had also been poisoned after spraying Polo. The two articles spell the name differently and do not refer to each other, so the record does not say they are the same person.
The report also quoted his cousin Vijay Sayam, who said they had been exposed from childhood. "Our parents and grandparents were spraying pesticides and insecticides such as Endosulfan and Monocrotophos," he said. He listed current products, Monosil as an insecticide and Asphalt as a pesticide, costing Rs 1,000 to Rs 2,000 for a 2.5 litre jar, and said he was training his two minor sons in farming and kept spraying because he did not know of viable alternatives. Those names are as the farmer gave them and the paper did not identify the manufacturers or active ingredients.
The Hindu placed its report against the regulatory record. It said PAN India's 2017 report, "Untold Realities", had highlighted the deaths, and that in 2017 and 2018 the distribution and sale of profenofos, fipronil, acephate, diafenthiuron and monocrotophos had been prohibited for 60 days in Akola, Amravati, Buldhana, Washim and Yavatmal districts. That is a wider list of districts than any of the 2017 and 2018 reports in the earlier chapters gave, and a different framing, since the Indian Express described a state-level stop. Where sources differ, the record takes the districts as The Hindu gave them, and notes that the earlier reports did not name districts.
D. Narasimha Reddy of PAN India told the paper that the pesticides the Sayam family used were not yet banned in India, that monocrotophos was extensively used in Maharashtra for whitefly and "to boost plant growth", and that it is not licensed for use on food crops but farmers use it unknowingly. He added that monocrotophos and Polo were named even by a government task force committee in 2017 and 2018, which is his reading of the record and one the SIT material in the SIT material supports for monocrotophos only: PARI's account of the SIT report and The Hindu's coverage of it both named monocrotophos, and neither quoted a reference to Polo. The Down To Earth article of 2023 also said the SIT report did not mention Polo.
The Hindu added that PAN International's 2021 list of highly hazardous pesticides includes over 100 that are currently approved for use in India. That figure is the paper's attribution to PAN International, not a government count. The Down To Earth article of October 2023 had given at least 116 pesticides banned internationally but allowed in India. The two counts have different owners and different definitions, and the reports do not reconcile them.
A second kind of record arrived in January 2026, a field survey by PAN Asia Pacific and PAN India. Its report, Field Survey: Pesticide Use and Impacts in Yavatmal, India, says PAN India began a Community-based Pesticide Action Monitoring survey in 2022 in six villages, and that over three years it covered 45 villages in Yavatmal district. The survey was conducted among 1,485 farmers, of whom 1,356 (91.31 percent) were men and 101 (6.80 percent) women, with the report noting that women's participation was small, which it attributed to the region's gender dynamics. The tehsils included Arni, Babulgaon, Dhamangaon, Ghatanji, Kalamb, Maregaon, Ner, Panderkauda, Ralegaon and Yavatmal.
The survey is a self-report by an advocacy network using a participatory method, and it says so. It was funded, according to its own notice, by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, which the report says does not necessarily share its views. Its answers are given as counts of respondents per question, and the number of respondents differs by question, from about 1,480 for demographics to 430 for acute health symptoms. The record cites the denominator for each figure and does not combine figures from different questions.
On pesticide use, the survey reported that 1,402 of 1,444 respondents (97.09 percent) use pesticide products, and 42 (2.91 percent) do not. Of 1,463 respondents on where products are applied, 1,441 (98.49 percent) said on farms. On history, 656 of 1,372 (47.82 percent) had used pesticides for more than ten years. On land, 1,106 of 1,442 (76.70 percent) owned the land they worked, and 336 did not. Those are descriptive statistics of the people the survey reached, and the report does not claim they represent all farmers in the district.
On protection, the numbers are among the survey's starkest. Of 512 respondents who gave a reason for not using protective equipment, 472 (92.19 percent) said it was not available, 25 said it was expensive and 17 said it was uncomfortable. Only 259 of 991 respondents (26.14 percent) had received instructions or training on protective equipment, while 732 (73.86 percent) had not. Of 1,169 respondents, 498 (42.60 percent) were using self-bought equipment and 671 (57.40 percent) were not. Of 988 respondents on employer supervision, 935 (94.64 percent) said their employer was unaware that they were not using protective equipment.
That last item describes the opposite of a supervised workplace, and it fits the 2017 findings of the SIT and PAN India on the lack of enforcement. It does not tell us why the employers were unaware. The survey also records wage data: of 949 respondents on pay, 662 (69.76 percent) said their hourly pay was below the minimum wage in India. The survey presents that as part of the economic context of the work, and it does not show whether the lower-paid workers are the same people who lack equipment.
On health, the survey's acute symptom list is based on a small subset. Of 430 respondents who answered, vomiting was reported by 53.72 percent and nausea by 41.86 percent, with dizziness at 13.48 percent, diarrhoea at 7.67 percent, blurred vision at 4.88 percent, difficulty in breathing at 3.95 percent and convulsions at 2.32 percent, according to the report's table. The report gives 1,055 non-respondents to that question. Chronic health issues were asked of only 75 respondents, of whom 42 reported some, with liver disease at 18.66 percent and kidney disease at 16.00 percent. Those percentages are of the 75 who answered the chronic question. They are not rates for the whole sample.
Spills, which the survey also asked about, give a sense of handling practice. Of 44 respondents who gave the stage at which a spill happened, 33 (75.00 percent) said during spraying, 19 (43.18 percent) during mixing and 16 (36.36 percent) during loading, with multiple answers allowed. The 44 is a small number inside a survey of nearly 1,500, and it shows what those who reported spills said, not how many farmers had spills.
A shorter journalistic summary of the same period appeared in April 2025. The News Dirt wrote that "officially, the Maharashtra government recorded around 800 pesticide poisoning hospitalisations, with at least 22 deaths in Yavatmal alone" in 2017. The piece offered no source for the official figures, and the number of hospitalisations does not match the government's own 507 in the Indian Express. The record lists it as a secondary outlet's summary. The same article described Gajanan Phulmali of Sawargaon, who it said sprayed against pink bollworm in late September 2017 and died on October 1 after nearly two weeks in a local hospital.
The details of that case do not match other reports. The Down To Earth report of November 2017 quoted Prateeksha Fulmali of Sawargaon saying her father died on October 1, which fits the date. But the News Dirt says he spent nearly two weeks in hospital before dying, while he is said to have sprayed in late September, which is at most about one week before October 1. Where sources differ, this is an internal inconsistency in the later article, not a conflict between outlets, and the earlier Down To Earth account should be preferred for the date of death.
The pattern across these recent documents is consistent in direction. Farmers say they still spray products they cannot name, from shops that sell them without equipment, and survivors say their health did not return. The survey data say most of them have no equipment and no training. What the documents do not show is any change in the number of deaths in recent seasons: the Hindu report of 2023 mentions two suspected deaths in Yavatmal in early August 2023, per Down To Earth, and no death count for 2024 or 2025 appears in the sources gathered here. Official figures after 2019 were not located, and the closing section lists that as an open item, not a finding.
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