MUMBAI, India — In the sweltering sugar fields of the western Indian state of Maharashtra, abusive practices such as debt bondage and child labor have long been an open secret. But in 2019, a state lawmaker named Neelam Gorhe documented a new level of brutality: Female workers were getting unnecessary hysterectomies at alarmingly high rates.
She presented her findings to the state’s health minister and alerted the region’s sugar regulator. She called on her government colleagues to ensure that workers received basic services including toilets, running water, and a minimum wage — all by Indian law.
Yet most lawmakers ignored the report, or read it and moved on. They launched no further investigation and passed no laws. The abuses, detailed in an investigation that ran in The New York Times, remain as widespread as ever, and young women continue to be coerced into unnecessary and potentially life-altering hysterectomies.
The reason, to many in Maharashtra, is obvious. Sugar is among the state’s most important industries, one that sells to big brand buyers such as Coca-Cola and Pepsi, and is heavily controlled by the political elite.
Most of the state’s sugar mills are led by sitting lawmakers or political figures, a new investigation by The New York Times and The Fuller Project found. That includes at least 21 state lawmakers, four members of the national parliament, five government ministers, and nearly 50 former officials. Mill bosses come from every party — both in government leadership and opposition — including the Indian National Congress, the Bharatiya Janata Party, the Shiv Sena, and the National Congress Party.
Countless other mills have business or family ties to politicians and lawmakers.
That means, in many cases, that the very people who could protect workers are also profiting from their exploitation.
“No one is on our side,” said Archana Ashok Chaure, a sugar laborer in her mid-30s who, since about age 14, has cut sugar for a Coca-Cola supplier. She suffered debilitating side effects last year after a hysterectomy that medical records showed was unnecessary.
The links between industry and politics are so close that some sugar mills list on their websites the government connections of their current and former executives.
“Not all politicians own sugar mills,” said Dilip Walse Patil, a state government minister and sugar mill founding director. “But most of the mills are led by politicians.”
Even the state’s former top sugar regulator, Shekhar Gaikwad, said that enforcing labor regulations or pushing for change was all but impossible because it meant taking on the state’s political elite. “It’s a clear conflict of interest,” he said.
The earlier investigation by the Times and The Fuller Project revealed a brutal system in Maharashtra that controls women’s lives from early adolescence. Young girls are pushed into marriages at illegally young ages to cut sugar with their husbands. Debt to their employers forces them to return, season after season. Working-age women said they felt pressured to get hysterectomies to resolve common ailments such as painful periods so they could keep working.
Government officials have used their political weight to maintain that status quo. In court documents reviewed by the Times, officials downplayed the abuses or denied that they occurred. In interviews, lawmakers and politicians said that, despite the evidence, the accounts of hysterectomies were overblown or false.
“I have not come across such things,” Balasaheb Thorat, a former state revenue minister from the Congress party, said when asked about the hysterectomies. Thorat is a figure at a sugar mill named after his father. “I have not heard a single woman complain to me about these issues,” he added.
Dhananjay Munde, the state’s agriculture minister and a member of the National Congress Party, said that he remembers Gorhe’s report. But Munde, whose wife and cousin operate sugar mills, dismissed it. “It was a huge report,” he said, “but it was half of the truth.”
After the Times and Fuller Project investigation, the U.S. Department of Labor added Indian sugar cane to its list of commodities made with forced labor. The list is intended in part to encourage foreign governments to crack down on labor abuses.
But as long as there are customers for sugar, the authorities in Maharashtra seem unlikely to force change.
And there are customers. International brands including Coca-Cola, Pepsico, Unilever, and others, as well as major Indian companies, buy sugar from Maharashtra. Both Coca-Cola and Pepsico pledged this year to look into abuses identified in their supply chains, but they have provided no detail on what steps they have taken.
An Industry Built on Exploitation
Practically since Indian independence in 1947, local landowners have banded together to build and operate mills, share profits, and finance public projects like schools.
These cooperatives elected chairs whose political power swelled as Maharashtra’s fledgling sugar industry grew into one of India’s most important.
“A lot of these very old-school kind of family politicians have used this as a springboard for their entry into politics,” said Sandip Sukhtankar, a professor of economics at the University of Virginia who has studied the political connections of Maharashtra’s sugar mills.
Among the sugar barons are some of Maharashtra’s most prominent figures. Sharad Pawar, who along with allies controls several sugar mills, is one of India’s best-known politicians. Pankaja Munde, Dhananjay Munde’s cousin and a state lawmaker from the Bharatiya Janata Party, controls a sugar mill opened by her father, who was himself a government minister. And Jayant Patil, a political ally of Pawar and a state lawmaker for three decades, is a director and adviser to at least one mill in the district of Sangli.
The Times has not linked any of these politicians to specific cases of abuse. But its reporting, along with Gorhe’s report and research by labor groups, has found that abuses are widespread throughout the region and linked to its system of recruiting laborers.
The industry, and in turn its political clout, has long been based on exploitation.
Elsewhere in India, farm owners directly hire labor to harvest their sugar cane, which is then sold to mills for processing. But in Maharashtra, the mills hire contractors to recruit migrant workers to do the harvesting. The mills argue that, technically, the laborers work for the contractors.
Instead of wages, Maharashtra workers receive an advance every season, paid by the contractors with money from the mills. That serves as a kind of loan, one that is all but impossible to pay off in a single season and that keeps workers returning year after year.
Because the workers typically do not own land, they cannot participate in the cooperative system. So, as mill executives profited, ran for office and established political power, the chasm between them and their workers grew.
Today, many of the mills are now private, not cooperative, but all benefit from the same system. It can be hard to separate the interests of the government from those of the sugar barons.
“They use their political powers to suppress the issues in the sugar industry,” said Devappa Anna Shetti, a former member of parliament who heads a small political party in his home state of Maharashtra. “This is being done deliberately.”
Some politicians argue that the relationship is beneficial. “If a sugar factory and a lawmaker are on the same page, for instance, it’s not an issue,” Thorat said. “It can help. They both want to grow the economy.”
Historically, Sukhtankar said, the two most powerful political parties — Congress and the National Congress Party — had the most control over sugar mills. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party, the BJP, has also grown in clout in the sugar industry in tandem with its rise in power in Maharashtra.
None of the parties has an incentive to challenge an arrangement that has been at the heart of the industry since its birth.
‘Laborers Are Not Employees’
Indian employers are required to pay a minimum wage and to provide benefits, including pension contributions. In recent years, the country has begun extending protections to workers in the gig economy.
Labor laws would seem to cover the sugar laborers. But mill leaders say that the long-standing arrangement with the middleman contractors absolves them of responsibility.
Gaikwad, the former sugar regulator, said that claim was an effort “to evade the clutches of these labor laws.”
The contractors, often young men whose only qualification is owning a car, say they cannot be held responsible for labor conditions they do not control. They pay the laborers with money from the mills. The government has made no effort to force these contractors to comply with labor laws.
Gaikwad ran the office that licensed sugar factories. But he said that he was powerless to do more than offer “mandates in the form of advisories.” Enforcing the laws requires political will, he said. And the politicians are not merely in lockstep with the mill executives — they are the mill executives.
Pawar is the patriarch of one of the state’s most important political dynasties. At 83, he has served as Maharashtra’s top official for four terms. He has led the National Congress Party for decades. The party split last year and he now leads one of the two sides. Asked whether sugar mills should provide any protections at all for laborers, he shook his head.
“Laborers are not employees,” he said.
That distinction is important because, if they worked for the mills, factory executives could be forced not only to pay a minimum wage but also to provide sick days.
Instead, sugar cane cutters must pay their contractors for a day off, even for a doctor’s visit. So women often forgo routine gynecological care and are encouraged to seek hysterectomies for issues such as painful periods or cysts, or as a drastic form of uterine cancer prevention.
Changing that arrangement could fundamentally change the way Maharashtra produces sugar. Sanjay Khatal, managing director of a major lobbying group for sugar mills, hinted at the industry’s reluctance. “It’s a contentious issue,” he said.
‘Children Are Not Allowed to Work’
Last year, the acting chief justice of Maharashtra’s top court read an article in the newspaper The Hindu about how sugar cane laborers lived in poverty, on the social and economic fringe of society.
Concerned, he opened a case and asked government officials, industry leaders, labor activists, and researchers to submit court papers on the issue.
The records are not public, but affidavits reviewed by the Times reveal a pattern of dismissiveness among state officials. One document, filed on behalf of state agencies, said that problems did not exist or were not that severe.
The affidavit denied that child labor was prevalent. “Children are not allowed to work in sugar cane cutting,” the affidavit said. As a practical matter, it said, cutting sugar was too difficult for children.
That claim was rebutted by nearly every laborer interviewed by the Times and The Fuller Project. Most women said they themselves had begun working when they were underage. A Times photographer witnessed children cutting cane. Many other children perform basic tasks like fetching water, interviewees said.
The affidavit declared that the workers were “free to move” and not locked in debt bondage. Yet even the contractors acknowledge that it is all but impossible for families to repay their debts in a single season.
And, in an oblique reference to Gorhe’s report on hysterectomies, the agencies suggested that her concerns were overblown. They said that about 17% of female sugar laborers had received the surgery — less than the 20% that Gorhe found and the nearly 33% cited in another report.
The government said that it had already instructed the sugar companies to provide housing for workers. And it pointed to the work of a state welfare board.
The board said that it, too, had done all it could. In its affidavit, it said it had registered workers and built hostels for their children to stay during harvest.
Enforcing labor laws, a board representative said, was the responsibility of the state government.
A court-appointed inquiry found evidence of child labor, debt bondage, and “atrocious” working conditions that harmed women’s health.
It also found a pattern of hysterectomies, according to an affidavit. “Since menstruation leads to a fall in productivity, it was more convenient for the women workers to get their uteruses removed,” it said.
Chandan Kumar, a labor-rights activist in Pune, Maharashtra who helped conduct the study, said government officials were denying reality.
“This kind of rosy picture, given by this government department is a lie,” said Kumar, of the Working People’s Charter Network, which focuses on organizing workers in the informal economy. “The government is trying to cover up wrongdoing.”
This year, the acting chief justice who had taken an interest in the issue was transferred from the state.
The case had already been creeping through the notoriously backlogged Indian court system. Now, its fate is unclear. A hearing is due, but no date is set.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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