An exhibition in Kochi, in the Indian state of Kerala, is showing photographs that many visitors find hard to look at: children with deformed limbs, others with swollen heads. They were taken in the 1990s and 2000s in Kasaragod district, where a cheap but highly toxic insecticide called endosulfan was sprayed over farmland for more than two decades. The photojournalist Madhuraj, who uses a single name, has documented the affected families for around 20 years.

From the 1970s onward the Plantation Corporation of Kerala applied endosulfan to its cashew estates in Kasaragod two to three times a year for more than 20 years. The chemical was later used on tea, rice and mango as well. What began as a low-cost answer to crop pests became one of India's worst agrochemical health disasters.

From the 1990s residents began reporting congenital deformities in newborn children and in livestock. Cerebral palsy, epilepsy and hydrocephalus appeared alongside skin rashes, hormonal disorders, asthma and cancers. Environmental organisations were the first to take up the issue; the Kerala government later acknowledged the illnesses as the result of endosulfan poisoning.

In 2011 the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants banned the production and use of endosulfan, and the same year India's Supreme Court prohibited its manufacture, sale, use and export across the country. In 2017 the court ordered the Kerala government to pay 500,000 rupees to each of around 5,000 victims. Some of them have told Madhuraj that they have still not received the money. The BBC has contacted Kerala's health department for a response.

Most of the affected households are poor farm labourers, many from marginalised castes and tribal communities, with neither adequate nutrition nor proper access to medical care. Madhuraj told the BBC: "I have seen with my own eyes how this pesticide destroyed entire families and left people disabled." He describes parents caring for several children with physical and mental disabilities, and elderly couples in which one partner has fallen ill after years of exposure.

From the late 1990s into the early 2000s civil society groups, environmental campaigners and ordinary residents protested for years demanding a ban, treatment and compensation, and many parents marched with their sick children. Madhuraj's verdict is that a state as advanced in healthcare as Kerala has still not delivered justice to the endosulfan victims.

For agriculture the Kasaragod story is a warning about residue and persistence: a chemical sprayed to protect a crop can remain in soil, water and human bodies for decades. Explaining why he wanted the pictures shown at the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, Madhuraj said nobody should be allowed to forget the price people paid for this disaster.

Source: BBC Bangla