Endosulfan in Kasaragod: two decades of photographs of Kerala's pesticide disaster

An exhibition in Kochi, in the southern Indian state of Kerala, was showing in March 2026 a set of photographs that many visitors found hard to look at: children with deformed limbs, others with swollen heads, parents marching with sick children in their arms. The pictures were taken from the 1990s onward in Kasaragod, Kerala's northernmost district, where a cheap but highly toxic insecticide called endosulfan was sprayed over cashew plantations for more than two decades. The photojournalist Madhuraj, who uses a single name, has documented the affected families for over 20 years, and his work was one of the exhibits at the sixth Kochi-Muziris Biennale, which ran from 12 December 2025 to 31 March 2026. BBC Bangla published a selection of the photographs on 31 March 2026, the last day of the exhibition.

According to the BBC, the Plantation Corporation of Kerala, a state-owned company, sprayed endosulfan on its cashew estates in Kasaragod two to three times a year for more than 20 years from the 1970s, and the chemical was later used on tea, paddy and mango as well. From the 1990s, residents reported birth defects in children and in animals, and illnesses that environmental groups and, later, the Kerala government attributed to endosulfan poisoning. The BBC also noted that some scientists in India have challenged that link, saying the evidence is insufficient. The story behind the photographs takes in a village doctor's suspicions, a court case, a worldwide ban under an international treaty, orders from India's Supreme Court and a compensation process that was still not complete when the exhibition closed.

Madhuraj visited the homes of people believed to have been harmed by the pesticide many times over more than two decades, trying to understand what it had done to their lives and bodies. "I have witnessed first-hand the debilitating impact on victims and how this pesticide has destroyed entire families," he told the BBC. He described homes in which parents were caring for several children with physical and mental disabilities, and elderly people struggling to look after a husband or wife who, he said, had fallen ill after long exposure to the pesticide.

The photographs published by the BBC, which carried a warning that some readers might find them distressing, cover about two and a half decades. They include a mother in 2010 holding an old photograph of her infant daughter, who had hydrocephalus (a build-up of fluid in the brain) and died in 2001 before her first birthday; a girl photographed in 2006 who had lived beside a cashew plantation and used to watch the spraying helicopters with excitement, and who died four years later; and a mother in 2014 weeping over the belongings of her 14-year-old daughter, who was born blind, had heart and lung disease and lived with her family near a cashew plantation. Other pictures show mothers marching to the district collector's office in Kasaragod in 2012 with their children in their arms to demand treatment and compensation, women travelling with their sick children on a night train to the state capital, Thiruvananthapuram, for a protest in 2019, and a father waiting with his son at a government medical camp in 2017 that was held to identify victims for treatment and compensation.

The series ends with a case from 2022 that, the BBC reported, shocked the state. According to media reports cited by the BBC, a woman in Kasaragod had looked after her daughter, who was born with intellectual disabilities, while also going out to work; the girl's father had died when she was a child, her grandmother died in 2014, and the special school she attended closed during the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2022, police said, the mother allegedly killed her 28-year-old daughter before taking her own life, and they told the media she had struggled to care for her alone.

Most of the affected families were poor labourers, many from disadvantaged castes and tribal communities, with little access to proper nutrition or health care, the BBC reported. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, civil society groups, environmental organisations and local people held large protests demanding a ban on endosulfan, and for years parents who believed their children had been harmed came to the protests with their children, asking for medical help and compensation. "Every journey I have taken through the affected areas has convinced me that Kerala, which has made great strides in the health sector, has not done justice to the victims of the endosulfan tragedy," Madhuraj said. He told the BBC that he chose to show the photographs at the Biennale to bring the tragedy more attention: "Such disasters, and their human cost, should not be forgotten."

Some of the victims told Madhuraj that not all of them had received the compensation the Supreme Court ordered, BBC Bangla reported, adding that the BBC had contacted Kerala's health department for a response.

The Kochi-Muziris Biennale is an international exhibition of contemporary art held in Kochi, run by the Kochi Biennale Foundation, a non-profit trust founded in 2010 by the artists Bose Krishnamachari and Riyas Komu, with support from the Government of Kerala. Its first edition opened on 12 December 2012. The sixth edition, curated by the artist Nikhil Chopra with HH Art Spaces under the theme "For the Time Being", opened on 12 December 2025 with work by 66 artists and collectives from more than 25 countries, spread over venues in Fort Kochi, Mattancherry, Willingdon Island and Ernakulam, and was scheduled to close on 31 March 2026, The Hindu and the art magazine STIRworld reported. One of its main venues is Aspinwall House, a former spice-trading warehouse complex on the Fort Kochi waterfront.

Kasaragod is the northernmost of Kerala's 14 districts. It was part of Kannur district until 24 May 1984, when it became a separate district, and it covers about 1,992 square kilometres between the Arabian Sea and the Western Ghats, bordering Karnataka's Dakshina Kannada and Kodagu districts. It has 12 rivers, more than any other district in Kerala.

A 2001 investigation by the Indian environmental magazine Down To Earth, republished in its 2017 timeline of the disaster, traced how the spraying began. Around 1963-64 the state agriculture department began planting cashew trees on the hills around Padre village in Enmakaje panchayat, with villages in the valleys below. In 1978 the Plantation Corporation of Kerala took over the plantations; at the time of the report its Kasaragod estate covered 2,209 hectares. Insecticides were sprayed to control the tea mosquito bug, a major pest that cuts cashew yields. The first chemical was endrin; endosulfan followed. Padre residents told the magazine that aerial spraying began around 1976, while the estate's manager said it had begun about 15 years before 2001. As early as 25 December 1981, according to the magazine, a weekly had published a report by the farmer and journalist Shree Padre on cows in Enmakaje giving birth to calves with deformed limbs after aerial spraying.

A report by the Kerala news site Onmanorama in February 2026 summarised the official position at that time: the corporation sprayed endosulfan from the air on its Kasaragod cashew plantations between 1978 and 2001, and 11 panchayats were later declared disaster-affected. They are:

• Ajanur
• Belloor
• Badiadka
• Enmakaje
• Kallar
• Karadka
• Kayyur-Cheemeni
• Kumbadaje
• Muliyar
• Panathady
• Pullur-Periya

Scientists at the Fredrick Institute of Plant Protection and Toxicology in Tamil Nadu, writing in the journal Pest Management Science in 2002, described the practice they studied in one Kasaragod village as regular aerial spraying on the cashew plantation for 20 years, with an endosulfan 350 g per litre emulsifiable concentrate applied at 300 ml per acre. Three months after the last spray, they found endosulfan residues in dried cashew leaf and small amounts in soil, but none above their detection limit in cow milk, fish or water.

The tea mosquito bug is not a mosquito but a plant bug of the genus Helopeltis, in the family Miridae. A paper published in January 2026 by scientists at the ICAR-Directorate of Cashew Research in Puttur, Karnataka, describes Helopeltis antonii as an important sucking pest of cashew and other tree crops. Endosulfan was attractive to growers because it was cheap and killed a broad range of insects: Down To Earth reported in 2010 that in the mango orchards of Muthalamada in Palakkad district, where the pesticide was still being sprayed by hand despite the state ban, it cost less than 100 rupees a litre and one litre was enough for an acre. The Stockholm Convention's secretariat notes that chemical and non-chemical alternatives to endosulfan are available in many situations, though in some countries replacing it for particular crop-pest combinations may be difficult or costly.

Endosulfan is an organochlorine insecticide that has been used since the 1950s. According to the secretariat of the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, it was used to control crop pests, tsetse flies and parasites of cattle and as a wood preservative, on crops including coffee, cotton, rice, sorghum and soy. Technical endosulfan is a mixture of two isomers, alpha- and beta-endosulfan, both biologically active. The convention's risk management evaluation put annual production at between 18,000 and 20,000 tonnes, in Brazil, China, India, Israel and South Korea, and said its use was banned or being phased out in 60 countries that together accounted for 45 per cent of global use.

The risk profile adopted by the convention's expert body, the Persistent Organic Pollutants Review Committee, found that endosulfan persists in the atmosphere, sediments and water, builds up in living organisms and can travel long distances; it has been detected in air, sediments, water and wildlife in remote areas such as the Arctic, far from where it is used. Its breakdown product, endosulfan sulfate, shows toxicity similar to that of the parent compound. The committee stated that endosulfan is toxic to humans and harmful to a wide range of aquatic and land organisms, and that exposure has been linked to congenital physical disorders, intellectual disabilities and deaths among farm workers and villagers in developing countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The first warnings came from people living below the plantations. Down To Earth's 2001 report quoted a doctor who had practised in Padre since 1982, Y S Mohana Kumar, as saying that disorders of the central nervous system were very common among the area's children, including cerebral palsy, delayed mental or physical growth, epilepsy and congenital limb deformities, along with cancers, infertility, miscarriages, skin disorders and asthma, and that almost all the ailments he saw were in people under 25. He had written to the Kerala Medical Journal in December 1996 asking researchers to look into the problem. After a protest against an aerial spray on 26 December 2000, residents formed an action committee, and on 24 January 2001 some of them obtained an interim stay from the Munsiff's court in Kasaragod restraining the corporation from spraying endosulfan by helicopter or any other means.

The most cited scientific study came from the National Institute of Occupational Health (NIOH), part of the Indian Council of Medical Research. Published in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives in December 2003, it compared 117 schoolboys aged 10 to 19 from a village at the foot of cashew plantations aerially sprayed with endosulfan for more than 20 years with 90 boys from a comparable village with no such exposure. Mean serum endosulfan in the exposed group was 7.47 parts per billion against 1.37 in the controls. The researchers found aerial exposure linked to later sexual maturity and lower testosterone, and concluded that endosulfan exposure in male children may delay sexual maturity and interfere with sex hormone synthesis, while noting that the study was limited by its small sample size and non-participation.

Other work pointed the other way. A 2003 study in Pest Management Science that analysed 106 blood samples from people in Padre village with a newly developed method found no endosulfan residues in any of them. Two Kerala Agricultural University scientists, K M Sreekumar and K D Prathapan, published papers questioning whether the spread of disease could be attributed to endosulfan alone. The BBC report likewise noted that some Indian scientists consider the evidence insufficient. Case reports continued to appear: in 2017 doctors from Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, described in BMJ Case Reports two siblings with congenital scoliosis living in a community affected by high environmental levels of endosulfan, and called the Kerala episode one of the most severe tragedies of endosulfan poisoning.

Restrictions came step by step. Down To Earth reported in 2010 that endosulfan had been banned in Kerala in 2005, after the central government issued a gazette notification withholding its use in the state on the basis of NIOH reports and other committees, and that in November 2010 the Kerala State Pollution Control Board announced a fresh ban under the Water and Air pollution control acts after finding endosulfan in water and sediment samples from the Shiriya river in Kasaragod. The BBC dated the state Pollution Control Board's action to 2004.

At its fifth meeting in 2011 the Conference of the Parties to the Stockholm Convention listed technical endosulfan and its isomers in Annex A, the list of chemicals to be eliminated, with a specific exemption for listed crop-pest combinations (decision SC-5/3). On 13 May 2011 India's Supreme Court, hearing a petition by the Democratic Youth Federation of India, passed an interim order banning the production and use of endosulfan across the country. The three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice S H Kapadia cited the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution and the precautionary principle, and ordered the authorities to freeze manufacturers' production licences, The Hindu reported. On 30 September 2011 the court kept the ban on production in place but allowed the export of 1,090.596 tonnes of existing stock so that manufacturers could meet their contracts.

India's National Human Rights Commission ordered on 31 December 2010 that the Kerala government pay at least 500,000 rupees to the families of those who had died and to those who were fully bedridden or had severe intellectual disability, and 300,000 rupees to those with other disabilities, The Hindu reported in 2012. The state proposed paying in instalments, partly as a deposit with monthly assistance, and the commission accepted that arrangement.

On 10 January 2017 the Supreme Court ordered the Kerala government to pay 500,000 rupees to each victim within three months, and asked the state to consider setting up a medical facility for their treatment. The BBC put the number of victims covered at about 5,000. Five years later, in May 2022, a bench led by Justice D Y Chandrachud found in a contempt case that only eight of 3,704 victims on the list before it had been paid, all of them petitioners who had come to the court. Of the 3,704, according to The Hindu, 102 were bedridden, 326 had intellectual disabilities, 201 were physically disabled, 119 had cancer and 2,966 were in a residual category. "The Government of Kerala has done virtually nothing for five years," the bench said, adding that the right to health is an integral part of the right to life under Article 21. It directed the state's Chief Secretary to hold monthly meetings to identify victims and complete the payments. In May 2023, after being told that compensation had been paid in full, the court transferred further monitoring, including palliative care, to the Kerala High Court, LawBeat reported.

Who counts as a victim remained disputed. According to Onmanorama's February 2026 report, medical camps held in 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2017 identified 6,727 victims, compensation to them was completed in October 2022, and 6,600 remained on the official list. The 2017 camp provisionally identified 1,905 more people, but only 287 were initially cleared and 76 added after review; following protests, 511 children under 18 were also recognised, leaving 1,031 people outside the list on the ground that they did not live in the 11 sprayed panchayats. After the Chief Minister announced in the Assembly on 10 July 2024 that assistance would be extended to them, and the state cabinet authorised it in October 2025, the Social Justice Department issued an order dated 24 February 2026 sanctioning 48.85 crore rupees to pay 500,000 rupees each to the remaining 977 people, Onmanorama reported.

The pesticide itself had not fully left Kasaragod either. In June 2025, The Hindu reported, a team led by the Central Pollution Control Board repacked 1,105 litres of endosulfan that had been stored for nearly a quarter of a century in the corporation's godowns, transferring the stock at its Periye estate from four barrels into eight high-density polythene containers, and doing the same at the Rajapuram estate, ahead of disposal ordered under the National Green Tribunal's supervision. Earlier attempts since 2012 to neutralise the stock had stalled after local protests. In November 2025 The New Indian Express reported that the tribunal had ordered the Central Pollution Control Board, the Plantation Corporation of Kerala and the state pollution control board to investigate missing barrels: the board had documented 278 barrels in Kerala in a report of 1 January 2024, but said in July 2025 that only 69 had been located. The tribunal ruled that the corporation must bear the cost of the joint investigation.

For farmers, the Kasaragod record is a lesson in persistence: a chemical sprayed to protect one crop can remain in soil, water and storage for decades after the last harvest it protected. Madhuraj said he showed his photographs in Kochi so that the human cost would not be forgotten.

Photo: Anish nellickal / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Sources: BBC Bangla, BBC News, Down To Earth, The Hindu, Onmanorama, The New Indian Express, LawBeat, STIRworld, Stockholm Convention secretariat, Environmental Health Perspectives, Pest Management Science, BMJ Case Reports, Archives of Insect Biochemistry and Physiology, Wikipedia (Kasaragod district, Kochi-Muziris Biennale)