Renuka Kiran Shinde and her sister Seema Gavit were convicted in 2001 of kidnapping children across Maharashtra, in western India, and of murdering them. A sessions court in Kolhapur found six murders proved and sentenced both women to death. The Bombay High Court reduced the murders to five in 2004, and the Supreme Court of India confirmed the death sentences in 2006. The children whose murders were proved were Santosh, Anjali, Shraddha, Gauri and Pankaj. By the Supreme Court's figures, none was older than 4.
The prosecution's case, accepted by the courts, was that the sisters, their mother Anjanabai and Renuka's husband K.S. lived by theft in crowded places and kept small children with them as cover. Children who were no longer useful were killed. The charges covered 13 kidnappings, one attempted kidnapping and nine murders between June 1990 and October 1996. K.S. became the prosecution's main witness in return for a pardon. Anjanabai died in custody before she could be tried.
The sisters lived under sentence of death from 2001 until 2022, and in August 2014 they were due to become, in the words of news reports at the time, the first women hanged in independent India. Their mercy petitions took seven years, ten months and 15 days to be decided. In January 2022 the Bombay High Court held that the delay was the fault of state officials and commuted both death sentences to life imprisonment. In April 2023 the Supreme Court let the commutation stand but directed that the sisters serve life for the rest of their natural lives, without any remission.
The court records give Renuka's names as Renuka Bai, also called Rinku and Ratan; in the 2022 High Court judgment she is Renuka alias Rinku alias Ratan alias Kiran Shinde. Her sister appears as Seema alias Devki alias Devli, or Seema alias Devki Mohan Gavit. The Supreme Court described them as sisters. News reports, including LiveLaw and BOOM in 2022, call them half-sisters. Neither woman's date of birth was given in the judgments.
Their mother, Anjanabai Gavit, was named in the charges with them. Outlook magazine, reporting at the time of the arrests, said she had been convicted of robbery and kidnapping in 1967 and had divorced her husband, a man named Gavit, about 14 years before the case came to light. Outlook called Renuka and Seema "ostensibly" his daughters. BOOM, in 2022, described the man as Anjanabai's second former husband.
The Supreme Court summarized the family's income in 2006. The sisters, their mother and K.S. made their money from thefts, mostly the snatching of gold chains at festivals and other places where crowds gathered. Outlook added that they worked mainly in Mumbai, Thane, Pune, Nashik and Kolhapur, rented homes in respectable neighborhoods, owned a car, kept bank accounts and held about 2 lakh rupees in fixed deposits.
K.S.'s own account, as the Supreme Court recorded it, was that he studied to the seventh standard, left school in 1982 and trained as a tailor in Pune. He met Renuka in 1983 and married her in December 1989 at a temple near Shirdi. Renuka already had a young son from an earlier marriage. The boy was not one of the children in the case.
The Supreme Court traced the method to a single incident in 1990. Renuka was caught trying to snatch a purse at a temple, the court said, and she got away only because she had a child with her. After that the family decided to keep a child with them while they stole. The magazine India Legal, reporting from Pune in 2014, gave the same account: Renuka pleaded that a mother with a child could not be a pickpocket, and she was let off.
From that point, the prosecution said, the group planned to kidnap small children, use them as cover during thefts, and dispose of them once they were no longer useful. The Supreme Court accepted that account. It found that the children were taken from bus stands, railway stations, temples and markets in Kolhapur, Thane, Kalyan, Mumbai and Nashik.
Thirteen children were named in the kidnapping charges. Some were abandoned rather than killed. One boy was left at a temple in Nashik and later recovered by a police constable; the sisters were convicted of his kidnapping under Section 364 read with Section 120B of the Indian Penal Code and of causing hurt, and received three years' imprisonment on the main count. Others were abandoned, and the fate of at least one is not stated in the judgment.
Santosh was about a year and a half old, according to the Supreme Court, when Renuka took him from a beggar at the bus stand in Kolhapur in July 1990. The court recorded that police later picked up the family and searched their house in Pune, where two children were found. K.S. bribed the police, the court said, and left the state; the sisters and their mother were held for a time and released.
In April 1991, in Kolhapur, Seema was caught trying to snatch a purse at a temple. The matter was not reported to police. Santosh was killed afterward, and his body was left in Kolhapur. Police could not solve the death at the time and filed a final report. After the arrests in 1996, the killing became one of the murders charged, and both courts below found it proved.
Anjali, also called Pinky, was about two and a half to three years old. The Supreme Court recorded that she was taken in Nashik on October 18, 1994. Her mother complained to police; her father lodged a formal complaint, a First Information Report, on November 1, 1996.
The prosecution relied on witnesses who placed the sisters with the child: a lodge owner in Nashik who identified the women and the girl, a neighbor who identified Anjali, and a witness who reported finding her body. Her murder was one of the five the High Court held proved.
Shraddha, also called Rani and Bhagyashree, was about a year and nine months old. The Supreme Court recorded that she was taken from a temple in Kolhapur and killed while the group was traveling by taxi from Pune toward Surat. The judgment does not give the date. The 2022 High Court judgment spells her name Shradha.
Gauri, also called Bhavna, was about a year and a half old. She was taken from a vegetable market in Nashik, the Supreme Court said, and killed in Kolhapur. The judgment does not give the date.
Pankaj was 4. The Supreme Court recorded that he was taken on July 27, 1996, from a temple in the Wadala area of Mumbai, and that he was killed in September 1996 in Pune. Outlook, reporting soon after the arrests, gave his age as five and said he was from Wadala. His was the last of the five murders the courts found proved.
The prosecution alleged nine murders, and the trial court found six proved. The sixth was a boy named Swapnil, also called Raja, taken from the bus stand in Kolhapur in March 1995. The prosecution said he was killed the same month. The Bombay High Court found the evidence on his death unsatisfactory, and the conviction for his murder did not stand.
Other deaths were alleged and not proved. A boy called Guddu, about two and a half, was taken from a railway station in Mumbai in 1993; the sisters were found guilty of kidnapping him but acquitted of his murder. A boy called Bunty, about a year old, was taken from Kalyan railway station in 1993, and the prosecution said he was killed. A nine-year-old girl named Kranti, Seema's stepsister, was also alleged to have been killed. BOOM reported in 2022 that the prosecution could not prove that charge. None of these deaths was among the murders the courts found proved, and none is established as a killing by either sister.
The Supreme Court judgment itself does not fully reconcile its lists. Its summary of the prosecution case names more children as killed than the trial court and High Court findings, which list only Santosh, Anjali, Raja, Shraddha, Gauri and Pankaj at trial and, after the High Court's ruling, the five without Raja. News reports have offered other totals. Outlook, writing at the time, said at least a dozen children had been killed; India Legal in 2014 said the three women were charged with killing ten. The figures fixed by the courts are 13 kidnappings charged, nine murders alleged, six found at trial and five upheld.
Outlook's report, published at the time of the arrests, described how the group was caught. In August of the year the case broke, Renuka and Seema visited the man described as their father, giving a false address, and took away their nine-year-old stepsister, Kranti. Later they came back for a younger stepsister, aged five. They tried to persuade her teacher at school to let her go with them for ten minutes, and the girl refused to go. They then sent a man to the family's home with a false story that her father had collapsed in the market. Her stepmother went to the market, saw the women there and alerted the police.
The Supreme Court's list of charges includes the attempt at the school, recorded as the attempted kidnapping of a girl from a primary school in Nashik. The sessions court found it proved; the High Court held that the finding had been wrongly entered against the sisters.
Outlook said Nashik police had picked up Anjanabai on October 10, and quoted Inspector M. Kale of the Panchavati police station on the investigation. The Nashik police commissioner, T.C. Wankhede, told the magazine that the state Criminal Investigation Department was trying to establish how many children were dead or missing. In custody, Outlook reported, the women told questioners "Maroon takla" (we killed them).
LiveLaw reported in 2022 that the sisters were arrested in Kolhapur in November 1996. Verdictum, a legal news service, said they had been in custody since October 1996. Gulf News, citing the news agency IANS, said in 2022 that they were arrested in 1996 and had spent about 25 years in Yerawada Central Jail in Pune. K.S. was arrested with them.
The Supreme Court listed the evidence it relied on: a police constable whose house the family had rented, neighbors, the lodge owner in Nashik, the doctors who performed post-mortem examinations, and relatives who identified the children from photographs.
K.S. turned approver on October 17, 1997, the Supreme Court recorded, and was first examined before a magistrate on September 17, 1998. He was granted a pardon under Section 306 of the Code of Criminal Procedure and examined as a witness under Section 308. Several news reports, among them Gulf News and LiveLaw, later described him as acquitted; the Supreme Court's description is a pardon in return for his evidence.
His testimony was the core of the prosecution case, and the courts did not accept all of it. The High Court found that he had suppressed material facts, and the Supreme Court agreed. In his version, the Supreme Court said, he had been "a silent spectator," and the judges found it "difficult to believe that these women alone had committed all these crimes." An approver's evidence, the court said, is always to be viewed with suspicion when he may be holding back. It held that his account was nonetheless "fully corroborated" by the other witnesses on the points that mattered.
The Supreme Court also noted that the law provided for prosecuting an approver who gave false evidence or concealed facts, but that the public prosecutor had not acted. In such circumstances, the judges wrote, the court itself had inherent power to proceed against him. No later proceeding against K.S. has been reported. India Legal reported in 2014 that he had driven the group's getaway vehicle and that the sisters blamed him.
Anjanabai did not live to be tried. The Supreme Court said she died in 1997. LiveLaw, and IANS as printed by Gulf News, gave the year as 1998; the Gulf Times, printing agency copy in 2014, said she died of a brain hemorrhage before she could be tried. The 2022 High Court judgment says only that she died in custody. Gulf Times agency copy said she had directed the crimes for money.
India Legal reported in 2014 that after their mother's death the sisters blamed her for the murders. The courts did not accept that the sisters were bystanders. The Supreme Court held them responsible as members of the conspiracy and upheld their convictions for murder read with criminal conspiracy.
The sisters were tried with their mother, and after her death without her, before the Additional Sessions Judge at Kolhapur in Sessions Cases No. 55 and 56 of 1997. The charges, as the 2022 High Court judgment summarized them, were the kidnapping of 13 children, the attempted kidnapping of one more, and the murder of nine of the 13 between June 1990 and October 1996.
On June 28, 2001, the sessions judge convicted both sisters and sentenced them to death. The trial court found six murders proved: Santosh, Anjali, Raja, Shraddha, Gauri and Pankaj. It also found most of the kidnapping charges proved, and the attempted kidnapping at the school. The death sentences were imposed for murder under Section 302 read with Section 120B. The death sentences were referred to the High Court for confirmation, and the sisters appealed.
A Division Bench of the Bombay High Court heard Confirmation Case No. 2 of 2001 together with the sisters' Criminal Appeal No. 718 of 2001. Its judgment of September 8, 2004, confirmed the convictions for conspiracy and kidnapping offences on almost all counts. It held five murders proved, those of Santosh, Anjali, Shraddha, Gauri and Pankaj, and found the evidence on Raja unsatisfactory. It set aside the finding on the attempted kidnapping at the school. For the five murders it confirmed the sentence of death.
The 2022 judgment of the same court recalled that the 2004 bench had found the sisters indifferent to the suffering of the children. The names of the judges of the 2004 bench were not reported.
The sisters appealed to the Supreme Court of India in Criminal Appeal No. 722 of 2005. Justices K.G. Balakrishnan and G.P. Mathur heard it, and Justice Balakrishnan wrote the judgment, delivered on August 31, 2006. It is reported as Renuka Bai alias Rinku alias Ratan v. State of Maharashtra, (2006) 7 SCC 442.
The court went through the evidence child by child. It accepted the High Court's view that K.S. had kept material facts back, and found his account confirmed in its essentials by independent witnesses: the constable who had rented the family a house, neighbors, the lodge owner, the doctors who examined the children's bodies, and relatives who identified the children from photographs.
On sentence, the court found nothing to weigh in the sisters' favor. "We find no mitigating circumstances in favour of the appellant, except for the fact that they are women," the judgment says. The court referred to new trends in sentencing and described the crimes as showing depravity of mind. It called the sisters a menace to society and wrote: "We do not think that these appellants are likely to be reformed." It dismissed the appeal, confirmed the death sentences and vacated the stay of execution.
Under the Indian Constitution, a person sentenced to death may ask the Governor of the state (Article 161) and the President (Article 72) for clemency. The 2022 High Court judgment set out, date by date, what happened to the sisters' petitions.
Within days of the 2006 ruling, between September 1 and 8, representations seeking mercy reached the President from residents of Canada, Japan, the United States and India, pointing out that the execution of women was extremely rare. The President's Secretariat forwarded them on September 8, 2006, and on September 15 the Ministry of Home Affairs sent them to the Maharashtra Home Department, noting that the Governor had to consider them first. The court counted the delay from that date.
The state's Home Department asked the Inspector General of Prisons in Pune for an opinion in October 2006. Reminders followed in January, April and October 2007, and the superintendent of the Yerwada prison sent his documents and opinion only on November 3, 2007. Renuka addressed a mercy petition to the President on January 14, 2008; over the following months it moved between the Nagpur Central Prison, the Inspector General's office and the Home Department, held up in part by the need for an English translation. Seema filed a petition through a lawyer on September 26, 2008. Renuka petitioned the Governor on June 1, 2009, and the President again on November 27, 2010. The Inspector General sent a recommendation to the Home Department on February 24, 2011, and the Additional Director General of Prisons forwarded his report on July 16, 2011.
The Home Department sent Renuka's petition to the Ministry of Home Affairs on April 12, 2012. On May 9, 2012, the ministry replied that the petitions of co-convicts had to be decided together. On June 21, 2012, a fire at Mantralaya, the state government's headquarters in Mumbai, destroyed the case files. The Governor rejected Seema's petition; the judgment gives the date as March 26, 2012, in one paragraph and August 17, 2013, in others. The rejection was sent on to the Union government in August and September 2013.
The Ministry of Home Affairs sent the file to the President on October 15, 2013. The President's Secretariat returned it on February 5, 2014, to be reconsidered in light of the Supreme Court's ruling in Shatrughan Chauhan v. Union of India, which had held that unexplained delay in deciding mercy petitions could justify commutation. The ministry resubmitted the file on March 7, 2014; it came back again on June 2 for the new Home Minister and was resubmitted on June 18. President Pranab Mukherjee rejected both sisters' petitions on July 7, 2014. The ministry told Maharashtra on July 16, and the state informed the sisters on July 30.
The rejection left the sisters facing execution. Gulf News reported from Mumbai that both were held in Yerawada Central Prison in Pune and that, if hanged, they would be the first women executed in India since independence. Gulf Times, printing agency copy, said the same.
The sisters went to the Bombay High Court on August 19, 2014, the day, according to the 2022 judgment and The Leaflet, on which they were due to be executed. On telephone instructions, the public prosecutor told the court the execution would not be carried out, and on August 20 the court recorded a Home Department officer's statement that the death sentence would not be executed while the petition was pending.
A Division Bench of Justices V.M. Kanade and P.D. Kode admitted the petition, holding it maintainable under Article 226 of the Constitution, and ordered the Union and state governments to explain the delay. Gulf News reported that the court refused a formal stay but kept the death sentence "in abeyance" until the case was decided; their lawyers then were Sudeep Jaiswal and Vijay Hiremath, who relied on the Supreme Court's ruling earlier that year commuting the sentences of 15 condemned prisoners. Gulf Times reported that Majlis, a women's rights organization opposed to the death sentence, was allowed to intervene.
India Legal interviewed the lawyer Asim Sarode, who had helped with a clemency application. He told the magazine that the sisters showed no remorse and were disruptive in jail, and that in nearly two decades of imprisonment no one had assessed their psychological condition. He argued that psychiatric profiling should be done in such cases.
The case then stalled. The 2022 judgment records that the petition was adjourned several times between September 2014 and February 2016 and was last adjourned on January 21, 2016, to February 18, 2016. After that neither side circulated it for hearing until October 2021, when the sisters' lawyers asked for it to be listed. Their first lawyer, Sudeep Jaiswal, had died in 2019, LiveLaw reported; Aniket Vagal argued the case when it was heard. In an additional affidavit the sisters blamed the gap on his death, poor communication, and their own lack of education. The court criticized the state for not seeking to have the matter heard once it had promised not to carry out the execution.
The bench of Justices Nitin Jamdar and Sarang Kotwal heard the petition as a specially fixed matter in late 2021 and reserved judgment on December 22, 2021.
As LiveLaw reported the arguments, Vagal said the delay violated the sisters' rights under Articles 19 and 21 and that they had lived for more than 20 years under the fear of death. Sandesh Patil, for the Union government, said there had been no delay on the part of the Centre or the President, who had rejected the petitions within about ten months of receiving them. The Chief Public Prosecutor, Aruna Pai, asked the court to dismiss the petition, saying any delay was neither intentional nor deliberate; The Sentinel reported that she argued any life sentence should run until natural death, since reform was not possible. The state also pointed in an additional affidavit to instances of the sisters' conduct in custody, which they denied; the court found them neither significant nor serious.
The court found the delay of seven years, ten months and 15 days "undue, unexplained and inordinate" and "entirely attributable" to officers of the governments, above all the State of Maharashtra. It rejected the Mantralaya fire as an explanation, since the fire came in 2012, years after the delay began. The state machinery, it said, "showed indifference and laxity at each stage of processing" the files. "That it took seven years only for the movement of files for such a grave issue is unacceptable," the judges wrote, when electronic communications were available. The Union ministry's share, about 316 days, was also not acceptable, the court said, but far less serious, since the ministry had repeatedly reminded the state.
On January 18, 2022, the court commuted both death sentences to life imprisonment and set aside the warrant for their execution. It refused the sisters' request to be released at once after 25 years in prison. A life sentence, it held, is for the rest of the convict's life unless the competent authority remits it, and the court said it was confident that any such authority would weigh the gravity of the crimes and the earlier courts' findings. The judges described the brutality of the children's murders as "beyond words to condemn."
The State of Maharashtra appealed. On December 13, 2022, a bench of Justices M.R. Shah and C.T. Ravikumar condoned the delay in filing and issued notice. On April 13, 2023, the same bench granted leave and allowed the appeal in part.
The court did not disturb the High Court's finding on delay. It held that the gravity of the offence was also relevant, and noting that "nine persons were killed," it ruled that the sentence should have been stricter. It directed that the sisters "undergo life imprisonment for natural life and without any remission." Bar and Bench noted that a life sentence in India is ordinarily subject to remission; the order ruled out premature release.
The court also gave general directions. If mercy petitions are left undecided after the courts have finished with a case, it said, "the object and purpose of the death sentence would be frustrated." States and authorities were told to decide such petitions promptly, and the order was sent to the chief secretaries of every state and union territory.
The 2022 judgment records that Renuka was moved to the Nagpur Central Prison at one point and later returned to Yerwada, while Seema stayed at Yerwada throughout. India Legal, in 2014, reported instead that Seema had been moved to Nagpur after the authorities separated the two. The sisters argued in the High Court that they had been held in solitary confinement; the state replied that they had been kept in the "Phansi yard," the section for prisoners under sentence of death. The court noted the ominous meaning of that yard but made no separate finding on solitary confinement.
In 2024 Seema filed Criminal Writ Petition No. 6216 of 2024 in the Bombay High Court, and Renuka filed a companion petition, registered as Criminal Writ Petition (Stamp) No. 21788 of 2024. The court's orders do not state what the petitions ask for. On July 15, 2025, no one appeared for the sisters and the matter was put off. On September 25, 2025, Justices A.S. Gadkari and Ranjitsinha Raja Bhonsale admitted both petitions but refused interim relief, citing the Supreme Court's 2023 direction that the sisters serve life for their natural lives without remission. On July 21, 2026, Justices Sarang Kotwal and Ashish Chavan recorded that the petitions had been admitted and would be heard in due course.
On that date both sisters remained under the sentence fixed by the Supreme Court in April 2023: life imprisonment for the rest of their natural lives, without remission.
Proven by final judgment: the murders of Santosh, Anjali, Shraddha, Gauri and Pankaj, as members of a criminal conspiracy, and kidnapping offences against other children, found by the sessions court in 2001, upheld with changes by the Bombay High Court in 2004 and confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2006.
Charged and not proved: the murder of Swapnil alias Raja (found at trial, set aside by the High Court); the murder of Guddu (acquitted, though the kidnapping was proved); and the other deaths alleged among the nine murders charged, including those of Bunty and Kranti. The attempted kidnapping at the school was found at trial and set aside on appeal. None of these stands as a proven killing by either sister.
Figures that vary between sources: the number of children killed (five upheld, six at trial, nine charged; ten in India Legal, 2014; at least a dozen in Outlook at the time of the arrests; the Supreme Court's 2023 order refers to nine persons killed, the figure in the original charges); the date of Anjanabai's death (1997 in the Supreme Court judgment; 1998 in LiveLaw and IANS; "during the trial" or "before she could be tried" in other reports); when the sisters were taken into custody (November 1996 per LiveLaw, October 1996 per Verdictum); whether K.S. was pardoned (the Supreme Court) or acquitted (several news reports); which sister was moved to Nagpur (Renuka, per the 2022 judgment; Seema, per India Legal); the date of the Governor's rejection of Seema's petition (March 26, 2012, or August 17, 2013, both given in the 2022 judgment); and the date of the President's rejection (July 7, 2014, in the judgment's detailed chronology and Gulf News; July 30, 2014, the date the sisters were told, appears as the rejection date in one paragraph of the judgment). Pankaj's age is 4 in the Supreme Court judgment and five in Outlook; Santosh's is about a year and a half in the judgment and eight months in Outlook.
1967: Anjanabai Gavit is convicted of robbery and kidnapping, according to Outlook.
1983: K.S. meets Renuka.
December 1989: K.S. and Renuka marry at a temple near Shirdi.
1990: Renuka is caught at a temple trying to snatch a purse and is let go because she has a child with her; the family begins keeping children with them during thefts.
June 1990: start of the period covered by the charges.
July 1990: Santosh, about a year and a half, is taken from a beggar at the Kolhapur bus stand.
April 1991: Santosh is killed in Kolhapur.
1993: Guddu, Bunty and other children are taken from railway stations in Mumbai and Kalyan.
October 18, 1994: Anjali is taken in Nashik.
March 1995: Swapnil alias Raja is taken in Kolhapur.
July 27, 1996: Pankaj, 4, is taken in Mumbai.
September 1996: Pankaj is killed in Pune.
October 1996: end of the period covered by the charges; the sisters are in custody from this month, per Verdictum.
November 1, 1996: Anjali's father lodges a First Information Report.
November 1996: the sisters are arrested in Kolhapur, per LiveLaw.
1997: Anjanabai dies in custody (1997 per the Supreme Court; 1998 per news reports).
October 17, 1997: K.S. turns approver.
September 17, 1998: K.S. is first examined before a magistrate.
June 28, 2001: the Additional Sessions Judge, Kolhapur, convicts both sisters, finds six murders proved and sentences them to death.
September 8, 2004: the Bombay High Court confirms the death sentences for five murders.
August 31, 2006: the Supreme Court dismisses their appeal.
September 1 to 15, 2006: mercy representations reach the President and are sent to Maharashtra.
January 14, 2008: Renuka's mercy petition to the President.
September 26, 2008: Seema's mercy petition.
June 1, 2009: Renuka's petition to the Governor.
June 21, 2012: a fire at Mantralaya destroys the case files.
March 26, 2012, or August 17, 2013: the Governor rejects Seema's petition.
July 7, 2014: President Pranab Mukherjee rejects both sisters' petitions.
July 30, 2014: the sisters are told of the rejection.
August 19, 2014: the sisters petition the Bombay High Court on the day set for their execution; the execution is not carried out.
August 2014: Justices Kanade and Kode admit the petition and keep the death sentence in abeyance.
February 2016: last adjournment before the case goes unlisted until October 2021.
2019: the sisters' lawyer Sudeep Jaiswal dies.
December 22, 2021: judgment reserved.
January 18, 2022: the Bombay High Court commutes the death sentences to life imprisonment.
December 13, 2022: the Supreme Court issues notice on the State of Maharashtra's appeal.
April 13, 2023: the Supreme Court directs life imprisonment for natural life without remission.
2024: both sisters file new writ petitions in the Bombay High Court.
September 25, 2025: the petitions are admitted; interim relief is refused.
July 21, 2026: the High Court lists the petitions to be heard in due course.