Early October in Maharashtra, a state in central western India. Recruitment is in full swing for the sugar cane cutting season which will begin in the south of the country, 500 kilometers away. It will last six months, and employ more than a million workers. The recruiting agents, the “mukadam”, are paid by the plantations to bring them by whole families to a region called the “sugar belt”, in the neighboring state of Karnataka. On site, they are responsible for ensuring their productivity.
Half of the workers are women, who have been toiling in the fields since sometimes the age of 10. The working conditions are extremely harsh: getting up at 3 am to do ten hours of work under a blazing sun, with only one day off per month. In this agricultural region, around the district of Beed, many of them are suffering from a mysterious illness on which “Special Envoy” has investigated.
In the sugar belt, 36% of agricultural workers no longer have a uterus
Here, one in three women no longer has a uterus. Often in their 20s, they undergo a total hysterectomy (with removal of the ovaries), which is very rare in such young women. At 30, they look 50, face and body aged prematurely. The operation causes a very early menopause, stopping the production of hormones and making them sterile. Why do so many women undergo this procedure with serious consequences? To find out, a team of “Special Envoy” followed the agricultural workers in one of the tent camps set up by the sugar factories, without running water or electricity, where they will live during the harvest semester.
Reka is 20 years old and is already thinking about having her uterus removed. She complains of recurrent and violent pain. She is continuously exhausted and her stomach hurts a lot. Many sugar cane cutters are in the same situation, confirms the mukadam. He assumes their advice to have the uterus removed, in particular to avoid cancer (a low risk, but brandished by the doctors of the region to justify the intervention). Then they can go back to work in the fields. The cost of the operation is their responsibility. During the hospitalization, they do not receive their salary, specifies the mukadam.
“If they don’t take it off [leur utérus], this is a problem for us. They are less productive. And if they have cancer, they are useless.”
Jyotiram Andhale, Recruitment Officerto “Special Envoy”
“Our recruiter yells at us if we don’t work hard enough, entrust the women to the journalists, taking advantage of the moment when the men leave to deliver the cut of the day to the factory. It also hits us very hard. Even when we are going very badly, he hits us. The mukadam yells at our husbands that we don’t work hard enough, and that we have to pay back our wages.”
It would therefore be to remain productive that these women are deprived of their uterus. More children, more periods… and more pain, according to the mukadam, who seems to regard hysterectomy as a trivial operation. In the rest of India as elsewhere in the world, however, it concerns barely 3% of women, and is generally only performed on patients over 50 years of age.
Thousands of sugar cane cutters, subjected to these pressures and fearing to lose their jobs, let themselves be convinced to undergo an irreversible operation. A sacrifice of their body to face the slave labor in the fields – quite useless, because their ordeal will only get worse with premature menopause.
Excerpt from “The Sacrifices of Sugar”, an investigation to see in “Special Envoy” on May 19, 2022.
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