Jaideep Hardikar

Sharmila Joshi

Editor

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Bandu Sonule, a farm labourer, around
40 years old, collapsed on his employer’s cotton field in Amdi village on September
19, 2017. All day, in sweltering heat, he had sprayed pesticides on cotton
plants, just as he had been doing for several days on different farms. He came back
home to his own village, Manoli,
in Yavatmal district, around three kilometres away – the farm owner brought
Bandu on a two-wheeler – after resting on the field for a while. 

Two days later, when Bandu’s
health did not improve, his wife Geeta took him in a local autorickshaw to the
sub-district hospital in Ghatanji,
a tehsil
town 45 kilometres from Yavatmal city. His complaints: stomach ache, disorientation,
tiredness. That night he began to have convulsions. When he complained of
vision loss, he was shifted to the Vasantrao Naik Government Medical College
and Hospital (GMCH) in Yavatmal in an ambulance, his condition deteriorating by
the hour.

On September 23, Bandu – who until
a week ago had worked round the clock and was healthy – went into a coma in the
intensive care unit (ICU) of the Yavatmal hospital. He died in the morning.

Bandu was a sought-after spraying expert, his frail wife says. “For two months,” she recalls, sitting in her small hut (see the cover photo) with their two children, Saurabh, 17, and Puja, 14, “he did not rest for a day; he was constantly at work.” A battery-driven spraying pump that Bandu operated is lying in a corner under the thatched porch of their front yard. When I visited their home in
October 2017, Geeta was still in shock. She did not know what Bandu sprayed and
what killed him. Her husband, she said, was trying to make the most of an
opportunity when cotton cultivators had to step up spraying due to a ferocious
pest attack on their fields in 2017. Bandu’s quest for some extra income claimed
his life. 

“He could have been saved,” says his friend and
neighbour Narayan Kotrange, also a landless farmer who tills a 10-acre farm
leased from another farmer in Manoli,
“had Bandu got medical help in time.” But the family waited a bit before seeing
a doctor, and then the gaps in treatment at the government hospital cost Bandu
and many others their lives. All of them labourers or farmers who accidentally
inhaled a toxic chemical cocktail during the intensified spraying of pesticides.
Those who came to the hospital quickly and got the right medication, survived.No monitoring mechanisms, ill-equipped hospitalsA few lives could have been saved if the GMCH in Yavatmal had the facilities to perform the crucial cholinesterase test to detect organophosphate compounds in the blood of the farmers who, like Bandu, became sick during the July-November 2017 spraying period. Without the test and without the antidote to this poisoning, for several weeks doctors continued to treat the farmers and labourers symptomatically, a doctor at the ICU at the GMCH told me. And crucial blood tests were not done at all.The report of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) confirms these gaps. The SIT was set up by the state government to probe the pesticide-related deaths and illness in Yavatmal and other parts of Vidarbha. The team was constituted on October 10, 2017, and headed by Piyush Singh, the Amravati divisional commissioner. The SIT’s six other members included Dr. Vijay Waghmare, the in-charge director of the Central Institute of Cotton Research, Nagpur,  and Kiran Deshkar from the Directorate of Plant Protection, Faridabad.

The <a href="https://www.maharashtra.gov.in/Site/upload/WhatsNew/SIT%20REPORT.pdf)">report</a>,
in Marathi, submitted by the SIT in December 2017, 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 Communist Party of India (Marxist) worker, Jammu Anand. 

On March 6, the union Ministry of Agriculture
reportedly told the Lok Sabha that Maharashtra saw 272 deaths due to pesticide
poisoning in the last four years – implying that the 2017 phenomenon was not
unusual. But going by GMCH data and the accounts of the doctors who attended to the
patients during the 2017 spraying period, Yavatmal had never seen accidental
pesticide poisoning of that magnitude – when farmers poured into hospitals complaining
of vision loss, nausea, dizziness, nervousness, partial paralysis, panic and
other symptoms. At least 50 died, over 1,000
became sick, some for months. (See <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/lethal-pests-deadly-sprays">Lethal
pests, deathly sprays</a> and <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/articles/fumes-and-fear-in-yavatmal">Fumes
and fear in Yavatmal</a>) 

By setting up the SIT, the state government actually indicated how
serious and unusual the matter was.

The SIT observes that the district
administration did not communicate the gravity and scale of the disaster to the
state government. It is also mandatory for the administration to constitute a
permanent inter-departmental committee under the Insecticides Act, 1968, and
for the state to ensure this is done. The committee has to institute a
monitoring team to keep track of whether farmers, pesticides dealers and
manufacturers are following the provisions of the law; ensure antidotes are
available to the pesticides being sold in the district; and coordinate a quick
response if there is a crisis. No such committee existed in Yavatmal, nor did
any monitoring mechanism. 

In its report, the SIT has recommended that the
GMCH at Yavatmal must be equipped to perform the cholinesterase test and it
must stock the medicines to handle organophosphate poisoning. This is critical
considering the unabated use of chemicals that contain these compounds to
control pests on cotton, soyabean and other crops in Vidarbha.

The GMCH in Amravati, the
divisional headquarters of western Vidarbha, managed the 2017 crisis better
since it can perform the cholinesterase test. Cholinesterase is an enzyme which
enables acetylcholine (a neurotransmitter) to function properly.  Organophosphate poisoning inhibits
cholinesterase, leading to a breakdown of vital organs, even the nervous
system, and eventually causes death. The Amravati hospital also stocks the
antidotes to such poisoning, the SIT said in its report.

The SIT has recommended that the
government must set up ICUs at the sub-district hospitals at Wani and Pusad, the two tehsil headquarters
in Yavatmal, in addition to a separate 30-bed ICU at the Yavatmal GMCH, and a
20-bed ICU in the Akola district government hospital, to handle pesticide
poisoning cases as was done by the Amravati hospital.

It has recommended starting a
state-of-the-art toxicology lab at the GMCH in Yavatmal, given the district’s
long history of pesticide poisoning cases. During the 2017 disaster,  the health authorities did not send blood
samples for toxicology tests immediately, a key gap in the post-poisoning
management.

Ban monocrotophos, keep
antidotes ready

The SIT has also recommended a
complete ban on monocrotophos, an organophosphate that deploys systemic and
contact action on crops, which is banned in many countries due to its toxic
effects on humans and birds.

The Maharashtra
government complied with a limited-period ban in November prohibiting its sale
and marketing for 60 days, but has not enforced a complete ban. The central
government has the power to ban monocrotophos in the country under the
Insecticides Act. 

States too can
suspend the licenses of pesticide manufacturers and sellers, or stop issuing new
licenses or renewing them. Punjab has done this – at the end of January 2018 it
decided to not issue fresh licences for 20 pesticides, including monocrotophos,
which the United Nations’ Food and
Agriculture Organisation classifies as “acutely hazardous.” Kerala banned monocrotophos a while ago. And Sikkim,
a fully organic state, does not allow the use of any chemical pesticide.

The SIT also recommends that the
government should not approve of the use of an insecticide unless its antidote
too is available in case of poisoning. The SIT report indicates a spurt in the
use of plant growth regulators, and asks the government for a long-term scientific
scrutiny of such chemicals before they are approved for use. 

The report doesn’t mention of the
complete breakdown of agriculture extension system – agriculture
universities, or the state agriculture department, have no systems to track the
arrival of new pesticides or pest-control technologies and their proper use.
These systems can play a crucial role in such a situation. 

Instead, farmers depend on the inputs dealer or shopkeeper for
information about new chemicals. And a dealer or shopkeeper is unlikely to part
with information about their acute toxicity when he needs to make a sale. The report indicates that farmers are experimenting
with pesticides on the advice of inputs dealers, desperate to contain pest
attacks and push plant growth for better yields and better returns. “The
concentration of new formulations of pesticides and other chemicals [in the
2017 spraying season] increased the toxicity and possibility of inhalation and contact
poisoning in extremely humid conditions,” the report says.

In the 2017 spraying period, the farmers used
synthetic pyrethroids, organophosphates, and other next-generation pesticides
in addition to plant growth promoters such as gibbralic acid (for enhanced
girth), indol acitic acid (to increase the plant’s height), and indol butyric acid
(for more adventitious roots). Along with some unapproved chemicals such as humic
acid and nitrobenzine.  (These approvals
must come from the Central
Insecticides Board, set up under the Insecticides Act.) The
SIT found that many farmers had  used a
combination of the Fipronil and Imidacloprid brands, pesticides that have not
been approved for use. The local markets are flush with such imported,
ready-to-use chemicals.

There is no way to check this
unabated use of unapproved chemicals. The report states that Yavatmal has 16 talukas,
but only one post of the district quality control inspector, and even that has
been vacant for two years. 

Hidden in the report, however, is
another major observation – the pest attack on the cotton fields of Vidarbha in 2017
was unprecedented, and especially ferocious was the return of the pink-bollworm.
But that is another story…

Blaming
the farmer

The SIT report largely pins the
blame on farmers and farm labourers for such a massive outbreak of contact
poisoning. It says they failed to follow standard rules and protection measures.
 

Farmers in Vidarbha, the report
states, used a combination of insecticides, both approved and unapproved,
plant-growth regulators and fertilisers, on fields where cotton plants had
grown robust, dense and taller than usual. In the exceptionally humid
conditions, the SIT observes, based on the farmers’ testimonies, it was like
walking through a mist and inhaling fumes, coming into contact with bigger
droplets as they kept spraying.

On February 6, 2018, a
Nagpur-based lawyer, Arvind Waghmare, petitioned the Nagpur Bench of the Mumbai
High Court, asking for a probe by a second SIT. Waghmare wants the new SIT to fix
the blame on the government for the lapses in containing the crisis and on the
companies that sell these toxic compounds.

SIT report: pest attack unprecedented, ferocious

ಕೀಟಗಳ ಉಗ್ರದಾಳಿಯು ಅಭೂತಪೂರ್ವವೂ, ಭಯಾನಕವೂ ಆಗಿತ್ತು: ಎಸ್.ಐ.ಟಿ. ವರದಿ

எஸ்.ஐ.டி அறிக்கை: முன்னெப்போதும் இல்லாத பயிர்களின் மீதான பூச்சித் தாக்குதல்

ବିଶେଷ ତଦନ୍ତ ରିପୋର୍ଟ: ପୋକ ଆକ୍ରମଣ ଅପ୍ରତ୍ୟାଶିତ ଓ ଭୟଙ୍କର

এসআইটি রিপোর্ট: কীটপতঙ্গের অভূতপূর্ব, ভয়াবহ আক্রমণ

अभूतपूर्व कीट हमले की एसआईटी रिपोर्ट

کیڑوں کے حملے پر ایس آئی ٹی رپورٹ

विशेष तपास पथक अहवालः अळीचा हल्ला अभूतपूर्व आणि भयंकर

Yavatmal

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SIT report: pest attack unprecedented, ferocious

The 2017 poisoning wave points to the profuse use of pesticides in Yavatmal and the desperation of Vidarbha's farmers. In the third of a three-part series, PARI looks at what a Special Investigation Team found

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