“I had to rush to work immediately after the surgery because we had received an advance payment,” Ms. Chaure said. “We neglect our health in the name of money.”
Sugar producers and buyers have known about this abusive system for years. For example, Coca-Cola consultants visited fields and sugar mills in western India and in 2019 reported that children were cutting sugar cane and employees were working to repay their employers. They documented this in a report for the corporate, supplemented by an interview with a 10-year-old girl.
In an unrelated corporate report that 12 months, the corporate said it supported a program to “progressively reduce child labor” in India.
Labor abuses are common in Maharashtra and not limited to any particular mill or farm, in keeping with an area government report and interviews with dozens of employees. According to the director of NSL Sugars, which runs mills in the state, sugar from Maharashtra has been sweetening cans of Coke and Pepsi for over a decade.
PepsiCo, in response to an inventory of findings published by The Times, confirmed that one among its largest international franchisees buys sugar from Maharashtra. Franchisee recently opened its third production and bottling factory there. New cola factory under construction in Maharashtra, and Coca-Cola confirmed that it also buys sugar from that state. Industry officials say these firms mainly use sugar for products sold in India.
Both firms have published codes of conduct prohibiting suppliers and business partners from using child and forced labor.
“The description of working conditions for sugarcane cutters in Maharashtra is deeply disturbing,” PepsiCo said in a press release. “We will work with our franchise partners to conduct an assessment to understand the operating conditions of the sugarcane cutting machine and any actions that may be necessary to take.”
Coca-Cola declined to comment on the detailed list of questions.
At the center of this exploitation is the Beed district, an impoverished rural region of Maharashtra that’s home to a big proportion of the migrant sugar cutting population. One local government report surveyed about 82,000 women sugarcane employees from Beed and found that about one in five had undergone hysterectomy. A separate, smaller government study estimated the figure at one-third.
“Women think that if we have surgery, we will be able to work more,” said Deepa Mudhol-Munde, a district judge or top government official.
The abuse continues – despite local government investigations, press reports and warnings from company consultants – because everyone says another person is responsible.
Large Western firms have policies aimed toward rooting out human rights violations in their supply chains. In practice, they rarely, if ever, visit the fields and rely largely on their suppliers, the sugar mill owners, to oversee labor matters.
However, the mill’s owners say they don’t actually employ employees. They employ contractors who recruit migrants from distant villages, transport them to the fields and pay their wages. The owners claim that how these employees are treated is between them and the contractors.
These contractors are sometimes young men whose only qualification is to own a vehicle. They claim they’re simply handing out money to mill owners. They couldn’t dictate working conditions or terms of employment.
No one is pressuring women to have hysterectomies as a part of population control. In fact, having children is common. Because girls normally marry at a young age, a lot of them have children in their teens.
Instead, they decide to have a hysterectomy in hopes of stopping their periods as a drastic type of stopping uterine cancer or eliminating the necessity for routine gynecological care.
“I couldn’t afford to miss work and go to the doctor,” said Savita Dayanand Landge, a sugar cane plantation employee in her 30s who had a hysterectomy last 12 months in hopes that it might mean she would not must see doctors.
India is the world’s second-largest sugar producer, with Maharashtra accounting for a few third of that production. In addition to supplying the most important Western firms, the state exported sugar to several countries, where it disappeared from the worldwide supply chain.
The abuses result from the precise structure of the sugar industry in the state of Maharashtra. In other sugar regions, farm owners recruit local employees and pay them wages.
Maharashtra works in another way. About one million employees, normally from Beed, migrate for a couple of days to the fields in the south and west. Throughout the harvest season, from October to March, they move from field to field, carrying their belongings with them.
Instead of being paid by farm owners, they receive an advance payment – often about $1,800 per couple, or about $5 per day per person for a six-month season – from the mill contractor. This hundred-year-old system reduces the operating costs of sugar factories.
