Eight, Twelve or Thirty-Two: What Balaghat's Disputed Death Count Says About How the State Sees the Baiga

When the State Cannot Count Its Dead, It Was Never Watching In 2004, the

Maharashtra government said 59 infants had died of malnutrition in Melghat that year, while local NGOs argued the true number could be close to a thousand. A decade earlier, in 1993, the activist Sheela Barse had already petitioned the courts over the same Korku tribal belt.

In 2025, the Bombay High Court was still noting 97 child deaths in Melghat in a single year. This is not new. In India's tribal heartland, the death count is often the first casualty of a health crisis, because the count measures what the state can see.

Balaghat's three numbers Balaghat now repeats the pattern among the Baiga.

The state government held the toll at eight deaths in four remote Baiga-dominated villages. The district's own Chief Medical and Health Officer put it at around twelve since June. Yet the government has earmarked thirty-two cases for compensation.

The Centre's outbreak team, in its report, declined to put a number on it at all. Three counts are not a statistical quarrel. They show a state whose surveillance never reached the people it was meant to protect. The NJORT found that the district surveillance unit was being run by a data manager.

The epidemiologist and microbiologist posts were vacant and no district public health laboratory existed. Even getting a reconciled list of the sick was described as a challenge.

The healer is a symptom, not a cause It is tempting to read the NJORT's case histories as a story of cultural resistance.

One family attributed a child's illness to Maata and chose traditional treatment. Another travelled about 35 km to a traditional healer before reaching the district hospital. A third was advised by an ASHA to go to hospital and did not.

But Kundekasa, the worst-hit village, had been without an ASHA worker for over a year. Where the welfare state appears only in occasional visits, the healer is the only institution that is always there. The choice reflects which institution has earned a family's trust over time, not backwardness.

The NJORT itself traced the deaths to failures at almost every stage: detection, vaccination records, laboratories, referral and follow-up.

Where the

Melghat parallel breaks Melghat's crisis was long tied to the Korku losing forest access after reserved-forest and tiger-reserve restrictions. Balaghat's, on the NJORT's evidence, is a crisis of absent staff and broken data.

Melghat also had a court watching it for three decades. Balaghat surfaced through a central outbreak team and a leaked report. The lesson is sharper for it: even without a judicial spotlight, the same invisibility produces the same disputed arithmetic.

For GS1, this is the pattern to carry into any question on tribal society. PVTGs were carved out after the Dhebar Commission precisely because the most isolated tribes were being missed. Six decades later, the measure of their welfare is still whether the state can agree on how many of their children died.