When my colleagues and I started investigating labor abuses among sugarcane cutters in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, we were surprised by how open everything was.
Debt bondage, child labor, and forced hysterectomies were visible. We traveled from village to village in the arid and impoverished region of Beed. Every worker we spoke to either witnessed or had been abused.
But for decades, little was done. Big Western brands such as Coca-Cola continued to buy sugar from the region even though they knew the workers were being exploited. Sugar industry organizations even gave the factory its stamp of approval, even though links to abuse were easily identified.
The workers said they felt abandoned by the government, struggling to feed their families and left to fend for themselves. The women showed us their hysterectomy scars and told us they had the surgery because they couldn’t afford to miss work for routine gynecological treatment.
Debt bondage is illegal. The same goes for child labor. India has a minimum wage and labor laws.
So where was the government?
this is how we do it
Almost everyone we interviewed mentioned a connection between their state’s political leaders and the sugar industry, but we wanted to quantify that connection.
Sandip Sukthankar, an economics professor at the University of Virginia who studies the issue, suggested looking for yearbooks published by industry associations in Maharashtra.
That didn’t work out, but my reporting partner, Kadri Inzamam of the Fuller Project, discovered that the Indian Society of Sugar Engineers publishes a yearbook every year. Among them, he found the names of hundreds of factory leaders in Maharashtra.
We then manually matched these names against lists of elected officials, government websites, and social media pages. We note that most of the factory executives are politicians, including current and former members of the Indian Parliament and at least 21 state legislators, five of whom belong to powerful state cabinets. It turned out that there was. Dozens more were former state legislators. Others were elected local councillors. There were also close relatives of politicians.
It is difficult to overstate how deeply entrenched the sugar industry is in Maharashtra’s politics. Our list included some of the state’s most prominent figures, members of generations of political dynasties.
Shekhar Gaikwad, former top sugar regulator in Maharashtra, summed it up this way: “This is a clear conflict of interest.”
Who is responsible?
The crux of the issue is who is hiring the sugarcane cutters. These migrant workers are employed by contractors, who are intermediaries employed by factories. Workers move from farm to farm during the harvest season.
They lack access to basic facilities such as toilets and running water and live in makeshift tarpaulin tents. In lieu of wages, they take out loans at the beginning of the season to pay off their debts. Contractors said it would be nearly impossible to pay off the debt within one season, meaning workers would have to return every year.
Sugar factory executives claim that their companies do not employ workers and are not responsible for their welfare. They blame the contractors, but the contractors say they are only representing the factory.
If the government decides that sugar mills are, in fact, ultimate employers, they will likely be required to comply with Indian laws governing minimum wages and benefits.
Sugar factory owners don’t want that.
How did this come about?
Leadership for cooperative sugar mills has been a path into politics for generations of legislators.
It “grants prestige and provides access to patronage and power,” scholar BR Baviskar wrote in a 1980 book about how sugar mills influenced the development of politics in Maharashtra. There is.
That was nearly half a century ago, and local politicians said the relationship between sugar and politics remained beneficial and fostered economic growth. They rejected suggestions that there was a conflict between their political positions and the industry’s role.
“For example, if sugar mills and legislators are on the same side, that doesn’t matter,” says Balasaheb Thorat, a former state revenue minister with long ties to the sugar industry.
But for workers at the bottom of the supply chain, the relationship is dire.
Government falsely denies abuse
The Maharashtra Supreme Court has taken note of the welfare of sugarcane cutters. The judge filed the lawsuit and consulted industry leaders, labor activists, and government officials.
We reviewed documents filed in court on behalf of the government that showed the agency had disregarded how widespread hysterectomies are being performed in sugar plantations. .
The document also falsely denied that workers were in debt and said they were “free to move.” This is opposed by all the workers and contractors themselves that we interviewed.
The same document states that the children did not cut the sugarcane. Again, almost all the workers we interviewed either witnessed child labor or started working as children. Our photographer even witnessed the children cutting the sugar cane.
