Published Mar 13, 2026 | 7:00 AM ⚊ Updated Mar 13, 2026 | 7:00 AM
Representational image. Credit: iStock
Synopsis: Dr Saikrishna Reddy, a young MBBS graduate distressed by poor NEET-PG results, consumed easily accessible paraquat pesticide from his family’s Telangana farm, dying despite treatment. A 10-year Gandhi Hospital study of 400 cases showed 73.7% mortality, mostly intentional among young male breadwinners facing financial crises. With no antidote and persistent availability, doctors urgently demand a nationwide ban on this deadly weedkiller.
Dr Saikrishna Reddy’s parents had been watching him for days. Something had gone quiet in him after the NEET-PG results came out. He had finished his MBBS from Gandhi Medical College, Hyderabad, 2019 batch, and had come home to Peddapalli district in Telangana to wait. He didn’t get the rank he aspired for. For a few days, his family stayed close, tried to reach him through the silence. Then one afternoon, they stepped out.
He walked to the family’s agricultural field. On the edge of the land, in a storage area where the farmers keep their equipment, sat a bottle with dark brown liquid inside – paraquat.
Local name: gaddi mandu. Cost: roughly ₹200. Purpose: to kill weeds before the crop goes in. Saikrishna had consumed it.
He was admitted to Yashoda Hospital in Hyderabad. Doctors worked for days. Paraquat does not give you much to work with. There is no antidote. By the time the poison reaches the lungs and kidneys, medicine moves from treatment to damage control. He died within a few days of admission.
Dr Manjusha Yadla, a nephrologist at Gandhi Hospital, Hyderabad, began collecting data in 2014. Not because she planned a study. Because the cases kept arriving.
“Gandhi Hospital is one of the tertiary care centres that has a huge burden of treating paraquat-induced acute kidney injury,” she told South First. “We have been seeing these cases regularly. Even now, we see at least two new patients every week.”
Over 10 years, she and her team tracked 400 patients referred to nephrology services after swallowing paraquat. The study, published in the Indian Journal of Nephrology, became the largest of its kind in existing literature. But she is quick to point out what it does not capture.
“We shared only a part of the data because we wanted to close the study at 400 patients. But there are more than 200 additional cases.” She paused. “And we are still counting.”
“Even now, we see at least two new patients every week.”, Dr Manjusha Yadla, Head of Department, Department of Nephrologist, Gandhi Hospital.
Paraquat enters the body and travels. The lungs take it up 10 to 20 times faster than other organs. The kidneys, doing their job of filtering blood, concentrate it in their own tissue. Once inside, it triggers a cascade of reactions, oxygen-free radicals tearing through cell walls, inflammation spreading, tissue dying.
“When patients come, they usually do not reach our hospital immediately,” Dr Yadla explains. “Many first go to smaller hospitals, which causes delay. By the time they reach a tertiary centre like ours, the latency is usually about one and a half to two and a half days. By then, paraquat gets deposited in vital organs like the lungs and kidneys and even in fat tissue. It affects cellular mechanisms and is released slowly, which makes treatment difficult.”
The study recorded an average delay of more than three days before patients reached nephrology services. By that point, the poison had often already done its worst. The clock that matters most, the first 72 hours, had already run down.
Doctors attempt hemoperfusion, a process that filters blood through activated charcoal to pull out the toxin. They run hemodialysis when kidneys fail. They put patients on ventilators when lungs collapse. None of it reliably works.
“The major problem with this poisoning is that we do not have an appropriate drug,” Dr Yadla says. “There is no antidote for paraquat. For organophosphorus poisoning we have specific antidotes that can reverse the effects. For paraquat, there is nothing.”
Of the 400 patients Dr Yadla’s team followed, 295 died. That is a mortality rate of 73.7 percent, nearly three in every four people who arrived at Gandhi Hospital with paraquat poisoning did not leave alive.
The average age of patients was 30 years. Three-quarters were men. Nine in every 10 cases were intentional, people who had decided to die and reached for the most available thing. In several cases, the pesticide was mixed with soft drinks or alcohol before being consumed, which accelerated absorption.
The lungs killed the most. Acute respiratory distress syndrome accounted for 47.5 per cent of deaths. Multi-organ failure followed, accounting for 34.5 percent. In the study, nearly 30 percent of all paraquat admissions developed acute kidney injury severe enough to require treatment.
“We specifically looked at patients who developed acute kidney injury because we are nephrologists,” Dr Yadla notes. “There may be other paraquat poisoning patients who never reach a nephrology centre or tertiary hospital at all.” The 400, in other words, may represent only the most visible part of a much larger crisis.
Dr Karthik Nagula does not see paraquat patients while they are still fighting. He sees them after. As a forensic expert and president of the Healthcare Reforms Doctors Association, he works at Gandhi Hospitals, where poisoning deaths arrive for examination.
“Approximately, out of every 10 poisoning deaths we examine, around six or seven cases are due to paraquat consumption,” he told South First. “This clearly shows how common and deadly paraquat poisoning has become.”
He was among the first to speak publicly about Dr Saikrishna Reddy. “He was from an agricultural background. He went to his hometown. His parents had noticed he was distressed. When they were not at home, he went to the family’s agricultural field and consumed paraquat.” Dr Nagula pauses. “Cases like this show how easily accessible paraquat is in rural areas, especially in farming households.”
The profile Dr Nagula draws from his casework mirrors what Dr Yadla found in her data. About 95 percent of cases come from agricultural backgrounds. Farmers. Agricultural labourers. People who work in fields where gaddi mandu sits alongside seeds and tools, treated as equipment rather than poison.
Dr Yadla describes her typical patient with the precision of someone who has seen the same face too many times. Male. 30 to 45 years old. The person the household depends on.
“These are mostly middle-aged breadwinners, predominantly males. Financial stress is the dominant reason. We saw a surge in the number of patients getting admitted with this poison after COVID, which implies there could be a financial crisis behind many of these cases.”
In the study’s ten years, a pattern emerged: men reach for paraquat when the weight of being a provider becomes unbearable. Job loss. Debt. A failed crop. A rank that did not come. The bottle on the farm costs ₹200. It is always there.
Not all the cases were adults. Dr Yadla describes two children, aged four and eight, who drank paraquat thinking it was Coca-Cola. “One of them we could save. One child died.” Accidental poisonings remain rare, she says, under one per cent. But they happen. The bottle has no child-proof cap. No warning colour. No smell distinct enough to warn a child away.
On 3 March 2026, the Indian Medical Association’s Telangana chapter held a meeting under State President Dr P. Kishan. What made it unusual was not the agenda, a push to ban paraquat, but who sat in the room together.
Representatives from the Congress Party, the Bharatiya Janata Party and the Bharat Rashtra Samithi occupied the same platform. Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Commission Vice-Chairman Kodanda Reddy sat alongside MP Eatala Rajender. Family members of paraquat victims had travelled from across Telangana’s districts to speak.
The meeting passed resolutions calling on Telangana’s Chief Minister to impose an immediate state-level ban and appealing to the Prime Minister for a nationwide prohibition. It was, by any measure, a rare convergence.
Dr Bandari Rajkumar, a critical care specialist representing theIMA, named it plainly: “Paraquat poisoning is not merely a medical problem but a national health and social emergency.” He announced that doctors’ associations were preparing a ‘Chalo Delhi’ movement, a march on the national capital to demand central government action.
Organisations including Doctors Against Paraquat Poisoning, HRDA, and IMA Telangana stated they would continue until paraquat was completely banned.
In February 2023, the Government of India issued a circular banning 66 pesticides. Paraquat appeared on the list. Doctors and activists who had spent years pushing for the ban felt something shift.
Then they read the fine print.
Paraquat exists in two chemical forms: paraquat dichloride and paraquat sulphate. The government’s circular banned one. The other remained legal. The pesticide continued flowing through supply chains, through shops, through online platforms.
“It is even available online through platforms like Amazon,” Dr Yadla says. “People with suicidal intent can easily buy it online or directly from pesticide shops. We have seen cases where people who lost their jobs or were under severe financial stress walked into a pesticide shop, purchased paraquat, consumed it and then came to the hospital.”
States had tried earlier. Kerala and Odisha both imposed bans on paraquat. Both reversed them within months.
The argument against a ban runs through economics. “The common explanation given is that paraquat is very cheap and highly effective,” Dr Nagula says.
“For around ₹100 to ₹200, farmers can buy it and it kills weeds completely.” Agricultural officials repeat the same line: safer alternatives may exist, but such decisions come from the central government.
Of the 400 patients Dr Yadla tracked, roughly 130 left Gandhi Hospital alive. She does not know what happened to most of them after they walked out.
“Follow-up is a major challenge in our system,” she says. “These patients may appear stable at the time of discharge, but we do not know what happens later. Paraquat may cause damage to the lungs, kidneys or liver even weeks later, in the third week, fourth week or sixth week. Often the mobile numbers given are not reachable and there is no structured follow-up system.”
Paraquat sits in lung tissue and releases slowly. Fibrosis, scarring, can develop in the weeks after a patient goes home, gradually cutting off the ability to breathe. In severe cases, the only option is a lung transplant. In most cases in India, that option does not exist.
“If we had the opportunity to study 30-day or 90-day survival, we would have a much clearer understanding of the long-term impact,” Dr Yadla says. “But we are not able to trace many of these patients.”
The study she published covers the condition of patients at discharge. It is, by her own admission, an incomplete picture. The data ends at the hospital gate.
(If you need support or know someone who has suicidal thoughts, please reach out to your nearest mental health specialist or contact the helpline numbers of suicide prevention organisations that can offer emotional support to individuals and families. Tele-MANAS: 14416; Life Suicide Prevention: 7893078930; Arogya Vani: 104; Sahay Helpline: 080-25497777; Roshni: 9166202000, 9127848584.)
(Edited by Amit Vasudev)
