Seema Mohan Gavit, known also as Devki, worked with her half-sister Renuka Kiran Shinde and their mother, Anjanabai Gavit, as pickpockets and snatch thieves in the crowds of Maharashtra: at temples, fairs, markets and bus stands in Pune, Kolhapur, Nashik and other towns. They took small children with them, because a woman holding a child is not suspected and a crying child draws attention away from a theft.
The children were not their own. Between June 1990 and October 1996 they abducted thirteen children, most of them under five. When a child grew too old to be useful, cried too much, or got in the way when the women were caught, they killed it. The methods recorded in the judgments are starvation and swinging a child's head against a wall or an electricity pole, and in one case a child was killed in front of a crowd to create a distraction while they escaped. The bodies were left in bins, by roadsides and on rubbish tips. The children named in the case include Santosh, Anjali, Shradha, Gauri and Pankaj, aged between one and five.
They were arrested on November 19, 1996, after Anjanabai's estranged husband went to the police about the disappearance of his daughter by another marriage, whom the women had also killed. Renuka's husband, Kiran Shinde, was arrested with them and later turned approver, giving evidence for the prosecution in exchange for a pardon. Anjanabai died in custody before the trial; accounts date her death to 1997 or 1998.
The sisters were tried in the Kolhapur sessions court on charges of kidnapping thirteen children, attempting to kidnap another, and murdering nine. The judge convicted them at the end of June 2001, on June 28 or 29 by different records, and sentenced both to death. Accounts of how many murders the trial court found proved differ, six or nine; on September 8, 2004, the Bombay High Court upheld the convictions but acquitted them of one murder, leaving five, and confirmed the death sentences. The Supreme Court affirmed in 2006.
Their mercy petitions went first to the Governor of Maharashtra, filed in 2008 and 2009 and rejected in 2012 and 2013, and then to President Pranab Mukherjee, who rejected them in 2014. They would have been the first women hanged in India. In January 2022 a bench of the Bombay High Court, Justices Nitin Jamdar and Sarang Kotwal, commuted both sentences to life. The judges said the nature of the children's injuries was such "that only an extremely depraved mind could have perpetuated such brutal killings," but that the state had left the mercy petitions undecided for seven years, ten months and fifteen days. "Though the procedure for deciding the mercy petitions mandates speed and expediency," they wrote, "the State machinery showed indifference and laxity at each stage of processing the files."
Maharashtra appealed. On April 13, 2023, the Supreme Court, Justices M. R. Shah and C. T. Ravikumar, let the commutation stand but ruled that life imprisonment in their case meant imprisonment for the rest of their natural lives, with no remission, and directed every state to decide mercy petitions promptly so that delay would not defeat a death sentence. The sisters applied for twenty-eight days' furlough in January 2023; the prison authorities refused on June 5, 2024, and in an affidavit to the Bombay High Court in 2025 the state opposed their release, citing the gravity of the crimes, the risk to witnesses and the complainants' families, and what it described as violent and disruptive behavior in prison. They are held at Yerwada Central Jail in Pune.
Renuka Shinde has her own page, which describes the same case. The count of five murders is shared between the two sisters.