“I had to rush to work immediately after the operation as we had received an advance,” Ms Chaure said. “We neglect our health in front of money.”
Sugar producers and buyers have known about this abusive system for years. Coca-Cola consultants, for example, visited the fields and sugar mills of western India and, in 2019, reported that children were cutting sugar cane and workers were working to pay off their employers. They documented this in a report for the company, complete with an interview with a 10-year-old girl.
In an unrelated corporate report that year, the company said it supported a program to “phase out child labour” in India.
Labor abuse is endemic in Maharashtra, not limited to any particular mill or farm, according to a local government report and interviews with dozens of workers. Maharashtra Sugar has been sweetening Coca-Cola and Pepsi cans for more than a decade, according to an executive at NSL Sugars, which operates oil mills in the state.
PepsiCo, in response to a list of findings from The Times, confirmed that one of its largest international franchisees buys sugar from Maharashtra. The franchisee has just opened its third production and bottling plant there. A new coke plant is under construction in Maharashtra and Coca-Cola has confirmed that it too is buying sugar from the state.
These companies use the sugar mainly for products sold in India, industry officials say. PepsiCo said the company and its partners buy a small amount of sugar from Maharashtra, compared to the total production in the state.
Both companies have published codes of conduct that prohibit suppliers and business partners from using child and forced labor.
“The description of the working conditions of sugarcane cutters in Maharashtra is deeply disturbing,” PepsiCo said in a statement. “We will work with our licensee partners to conduct an assessment to understand the working conditions of the cane and any actions that may need to be taken.”
Coca-Cola declined to comment on a detailed list of questions.
The heart of this operation is the district of Beed, a poor, rural area of Maharashtra that is home to much of the migrant sugar-cutting population. A local government report looked at about 82,000 female sugarcane workers from Beed and found that about one in five had undergone a hysterectomy. A separate, smaller government survey put the number at one in three.
“Women think that if we do the surgery, then we will be able to work more,” said Deepa Mudhol-Munde, a district judge or senior civil servant.
The abuses continue – despite local government investigations, news reports and warnings from company advisers – because everyone says someone else is responsible.
Major Western companies have policies committed to rooting out human rights abuses in their supply chains. In practice, they rarely ever visit the fields and rely heavily on their suppliers, the sugar mill owners, to oversee labor matters.
The mill owners, however, say they are not actually employing the workers. They hire contractors to recruit migrants from distant villages, transport them to the fields and pay their wages. How those workers are treated, the owners say, is between them and the contractors.
These contractors are often young men whose only qualification is that they own a vehicle. They are just spending the money of the mill owners, they say. They could not dictate working conditions or terms of employment.
No one is pushing women to have hysterectomies as a form of population control. In fact, having children is a common occurrence. Because girls usually marry young, many have children in their teens.
Instead, they seek hysterectomy in hopes of stopping their periods, as an active form of uterine cancer prevention, or to end the need for routine gynecological care.
“I couldn’t afford to miss work to see the doctor,” said Savita Dayanand Landge, a sugarcane worker in her 30s who had a hysterectomy last year because she hoped it would end her need to see doctors.
India is the second largest producer of sugar in the world and Maharashtra accounts for about a third of this production. In addition to supplying Indian and Western companies, the state has exported sugar to more than a dozen countries, where it has disappeared into the global supply chain.
The abuses are born out of the peculiar set-up of the Maharashtra sugar industry. In other sugar regions, farm owners hire local laborers and pay them wages.
Maharashtra works differently. About a million workers, mostly from Beed, migrate for days to fields in the south and west. Throughout the harvest, from October to about March, they move from field to field, carting their belongings.
Instead of wages from the farm owners, they receive an advance — often about $1,800 per couple, or about $5 a day per person for a six-month period — from a mill contractor. This century-old system reduces labor costs for sugar mills.
