Renuka Kiran Shinde and Seema Mohan Gavit were sisters who worked with their mother, Anjanabai Gavit, in Pune, Kolhapur, Nashik and other towns of Maharashtra. The family lived by pickpocketing and snatching in crowded places, temples, markets, bus stands, and they took small children with them because a woman carrying a child is not suspected and because a crying child covers a theft.
Between 1990 and 1996 they abducted thirteen children, most of them under five. When a child grew too old to be useful, or cried too much, or drew attention when they were caught in the act, they killed it. The methods recorded in the judgments are starvation, being swung 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 in rubbish tips.
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. Anjanabai died in custody in 1997, before trial.
The sessions court at Kolhapur convicted both sisters and sentenced them to death on June 29, 2001. The prosecution alleged thirteen abductions and nine killings; the courts held five murders proved. The Bombay High Court upheld the sentences in 2004 and the Supreme Court in 2006, and a mercy petition was rejected by the President in 2014. In January 2022 the Bombay High Court commuted both death sentences to life imprisonment, on the ground that the state had left the mercy petition and the execution unresolved for years in a way that amounted to a violation of their rights.
They were among the very few women under sentence of death in India, and for two decades the case was cited in every argument about whether the country would hang a woman.
The victim figures in this roster are the totals for the case, not for Gavit individually: five murders proved, nine alleged, thirteen abductions. Renuka Shinde has her own entry in this archive and it describes the same case.