Eight Baiga children have died in Madhya Pradesh’s Balaghat district between June and August, while more than 200 people have reportedly fallen sick across a cluster of remote villages.
The exact cause of the deaths remains unclear.
District Chief Medical and Health Officer Paresh Uplav has cited several possibilities, including scabies, measles, contaminated water, and malaria. District Collector Kumar Satyam has said the deaths occurred amid seasonal diseases, measles, and falciparum malaria. The Congress, meanwhile, has claimed that 19 people have died and issued a list naming the deceased and their villages.
The cause of death should be established scientifically, rather than assumed. But there is another question that does not require a laboratory report: why did the state’s healthcare system reach these villages only after children started dying?
The question is particularly important because the victims are Baigas, a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group (PVTG) whose socioeconomic and infrastructural vulnerabilities are recognised by the state.
Malaria, measles, contaminated water or scabies may explain what happened in Balaghat. They do not explain why a PVTG remained so far outside the reach of preventive healthcare.
When ‘Referral’ Becomes Abandonment
The affected villages—Machurda, Adori, Bondari, Korka and Kundeksa—lie deep inside the forested Baihar-Birsa belt of Balaghat, more than 125 kilometres from the district headquarters. The nearest primary health centre is about 15 kilometres away. But for villagers, that distance is only the beginning.
Patients are often referred from the primary health centre (PHC) to a block-development hospital and then onwards to Baihar sub division, nearly 70 kilometres away.
For a tribal family carrying a sick child through a forested and difficult terrain, “referral” can become another word for abandonment.
The administration eventually sent health teams to the affected villages and then expanded the exercise to around 40 more villages in the region. A local school at Kundeksa was temporarily converted into a hospital, while seriously ill patients were shifted to hospitals in Baihar and Balaghat. Many have since been discharged.
But the chronology tells its own story: the system mobilised after the crisis became visible, rather than preventing it from becoming one. That is especially troubling because the victims are Baigas, a Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Group, (PVTG).
PVTGs are not simply another administrative category. They are communities recognised by the state as facing particular socioeconomic and infrastructural vulnerabilities. That recognition should translate into greater state support and a stronger public-health presence.
Instead, the Balaghat episode reveals a familiar geography of unequal citizenship: the farther a citizen lives from a district headquarters, the greater the distance between that citizen and the state.
An Outbreak or a Failure of Public Health?
The affected villages are surrounded by forest and lie close to the Kanha National Park landscape. Malaria is a known threat in such areas, particularly during the monsoon.
Yet the obvious preventive question is being overshadowed by the search for a single cause of death. If malaria is suspected, where were sustained anti-malaria operations before the outbreak? If contaminated water is suspected, where was the regular testing of drinking-water sources? If measles is involved, what does the vaccination and surveillance record of these villages show? And if scabies is contributing to illness, what does that say about access to basic sanitation, treatment, and community health workers?
These are not exotic diseases requiring sophisticated laboratories. They are precisely the kinds of illnesses against which a functioning rural public-health system is expected to build a protective wall.
Instead, villagers are reportedly dependent on ponds and other water bodies where rainwater collects. There is little access to piped potable water. Roads are being constructed, but basic public infrastructure remains scarce.
For years, the region was affected by Left Wing Extremism. Security operations and the construction of roads have changed the security environment in recent months. But a road by itself is not healthcare.
A road is useful when an ambulance can travel on it and take patients to a hospital.
Blaming the ‘Pujari’ Is Not Enough
The district collector has said that Baiga families often have low immunity and that they look towards local pujaris or traditional practitioners instead of doctors.
The preference for traditional healers is real and cannot simply be dismissed. Earlier research among Baiga communities in Balaghat has documented reliance on traditional healers, alongside serious problems of distance, poor public-service access, sanitation and nutrition.
But there is a danger in turning this into a story about “tribal beliefs” and thereby shifting responsibility away from the health system.
People use a health facility when it is accessible, trustworthy, and responsive. If the nearest PHC is 15 kilometres away, if the PHC refers the patient further away, and if the final hospital is dozens of kilometres beyond that, a traditional healer within the community can understandably appear more accessible.
The state cannot tell a mother to trust a doctor while making the doctor geographically unreachable.
The problem, therefore, is not simply that a Baiga family may first approach a traditional healer. The question is why the public-health system has not built enough trust—or enough presence—to make professional healthcare the first and easiest option.
The Nutrition Question Cannot Be Ignored
There is another reason the crisis deserves greater scrutiny: the nutritional vulnerability of children in Madhya Pradesh.
National Family Health Survey -6 or the NFHS-6, conducted in 2023-24 and released by the Union Health Ministry in May 2026, provides a particularly uncomfortable backdrop. In Madhya Pradesh, 31.4 percent of children under five are stunted, 23.8 percent are wasted and 39.7 percent are underweight, according to NFHS-6. The state's wasting figure is the highest among states, while its underweight figure is the second highest, behind Jharkhand.
The deterioration in some indicators is particularly striking. Underweight children increased from 33 percent in NFHS-5 to 39.7 percent in NFHS-6, while wasting increased from 18.9 percent to 23.8 percent.
These are state-level figures, not measurements of the Baiga children who have fallen sick in Balaghat. They cannot be used to claim that malnutrition caused these particular deaths.
But they establish something crucial: a child-health crisis is unfolding against a background of substantial nutritional vulnerability.
A malnourished child can have less resilience when confronted with infection, as the collector has pointed out. That makes nutrition, immunisation, clean water, malaria prevention and timely medical treatment parts of the same public-health chain.
Lessons Not Learnt?
The tragedy is not isolated. Balaghat comes after a difficult year for public health in Madhya Pradesh.
In late 2025, children in Chhindwara died after consuming contaminated cough syrup. The episode exposed failures extending from pharmaceutical manufacturing and regulation to diagnosis and treatment. The toll in Chhindwara ultimately rose into the teens, with the state launching an investigation into the deaths.
Then came Bhagirathpura in Indore, where contaminated drinking water triggered a major outbreak of diarrhoeal disease. A government medical panel attributed at least 15 deaths to the outbreak, while a later joint inspection report confirmed severe contamination of the municipal water supply, including pathogenic organisms and faecal contamination.
The three episodes are obviously different. Chhindwara was a drug-safety disaster. Bhagirathpura was an urban water-contamination disaster. Balaghat appears to involve a combination of infectious disease, water insecurity, environmental exposure, and healthcare inaccessibility.
But together, they raise one uncomfortable question: how well does Madhya Pradesh's public-health machinery detect danger before it becomes a tragedy?
The Distance Between a Village and Healthcare
The government has now sent teams into the affected villages. Water samples have reportedly been sent to laboratories in Pune and Kolkata, with reports awaited. Those are necessary steps.
But the more important response must continue after the headlines disappear.
There should be systematic malaria surveillance and vector-control operations. Drinking-water sources need regular testing and safe alternatives during the monsoon. Vaccination and measles surveillance must be audited village by village. Nutrition screening should be intensified among children, pregnant women, and lactating mothers. Mobile medical teams cannot be an emergency response alone; they need to become a permanent bridge between remote habitations and the formal health system.
For the Baigas of Balaghat, that distance is measured not merely in kilometres but in roads, referrals, unavailable services, contaminated water, and delayed intervention.
The state may eventually tell us whether malaria, measles, scabies, contaminated water—or some combination of these—killed the children.
But there is already one answer that needs no laboratory test: The children were living in villages where the public-health system was too far away, too thinly present, and too late, to prevent a local health crisis from becoming a tragedy.
The distance between a tribal hamlet and the state’s healthcare system should be measured in kilometers, not in children’s lives.
(Deshdeep Saxena is a senior journalist, formerly with the Times of India.This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)