Sagar hooch deaths rise through Sunday morning as Banda villages are screened

Deaths after suspected spurious liquor in Sagar district of Madhya Pradesh climbed through Sunday as officials issued three different tallies. Collector Pratibha Pal told PTI that six people had died and four to five others had been sent to Bundelkhand Medical College and Hospital with headache and vomiting. Superintendent of Police Anurag Sujania later told PTI the dead numbered nine, and that two further deaths the same morning had not been tied to the liquor. Banda BJP MLA Virendra Lodhi said 11 people were dead and about 25 patients had been shifted from Banda Civil Hospital for higher care.

The first death was reported in the early hours of 6 September. Pal said the drinking took place in two villages of Banda tehsil, about 30 kilometres from the district headquarters. Screening of both villages had started. Preliminary autopsy reports had not reached her office when she spoke.

Names circulating in local reports included Golu alias Chaman Lodhi, 45, of Gogra Khurd; Digvijay Lodhi, 28; Kartar Singh Lodhi, 30; Ujiyar Singh Lodhi, 56; Roshan Lodhi, 30; and Rajendra Lodhi, 32. Critically ill patients named in one account were Harnam Rai, 42; Uttam Nathu Nayak, 42; Mangal Rajak, 40; Param Adivasi, 30; and Dhansingh Adivasi, 30. Those lists should be read as provisional until the police issue a charge sheet and the medical college issues cause-of-death notes.

Hooch deaths in India usually trace to methanol mixed into cheap spirit. Methanol is used in paint and varnish. A small dose blinds. A larger dose stops the heart and the breathing centre. Confirmation waits on viscera sent to a forensic lab, which is why Pal stressed that autopsy papers were not in. Until those papers arrive, the administration is treating the event as a spurious-liquor cluster and running village-to-village checks for anyone with headache, vomiting or blurred vision.

The timing sits one month after 13 deaths from spurious liquor in Bhavnagar district of Gujarat. That cluster was later tied to methanol. The two states do not share a supply chain on the public record, but they share the same enforcement problem: licensed shops sit beside an illegal trade that undercuts them on price.

Banda is a Vidhan Sabha seat. Lodhi's intervention, and his higher death count, puts the ruling party on the record before the laboratory does. Pal and Sujania, as collector and SP, have to hold a single official number. The gap between six, nine and eleven is the gap between a hospital ward list and a village list that includes people who died at home.

What happens next is mechanical. Police raid the sellers named by the families. Excise officers lift samples from any remaining cans. The medical college treats the five or 25 patients, depending on which list holds. The forensic report will say whether this was methanol or another poison. If it is methanol, the case becomes a factory-and-transport hunt, not only a village bootlegger case.

For the two villages the immediate risk is a second wave: people who drank less and have not yet collapsed. That is the point of the Sunday screening. It is also why the official toll may move again before night.