Sugarcane plantations and the associated political economy is probably one of the most pressing issues of social life in Maharashtra. Unfortunately, its politicisation by the mainstream political parties is almost absent. These plantations, sugarcane factories, and co-operative banks forming the network, are mostly owned and controlled by the landowning caste(s) which gives them a high class position in the society, translating into their political power supplemented by factors such as population percentage as well.
According to the paper published by the International Institute for Environment and Development titled ‘Women Paying the Cost of Climate Crisis with their Wombs’, recent decades have witnessed a significant increase of migration from Beed district to Western Maharashtra, where most of the sugar plantations are located. This is due to decreasing rainfall in an already drought-affected region and the historically uneven nature of economic development in Maharashtra.
According to a report by the New Indian express, over 13,000 women working in these plantations have been opting to remove their uterus (hysterectomy) and hence sacrificing not only their bodily autonomy and biological humanness, but also the choice of starting a family. This choice is a product of contractors not preferring to hire women who can get pregnant or go through periods which might make them a) physically vulnerable b) work for fewer days c) demand legal maternal rights (leave, pay, etc.) d) take leave during periods. All this calculation is done to extract more work from these female labourers to keep profit rates high. If they miss one day of work, serious wage cuts are made forcing them to opt for extreme steps like hysterectomy.
Sugarcane plantation work requires the worker to a) do physically demanding labour intensive work b) perform repetitive movements in a particular posture c) be exposed to various chemical residues d) work in various temperatures as well as in close contact with dangerous animals. Apart from this, the workers are also working for extended work hours with irregular breaks and very low wages. They mostly live near the fields in some temporary huts without proper facilities. In absence of toilets, issues related to hygiene add to the misery. Since the work hours are also not fixed, often they have to work at night as well. They are so vulnerable that one frequently reads about news of sugarcane plantation workers’ children getting crushed by tractors or bitten by snakes.Two points stand out here. First, the exploitation that is happening here is of a capitalist nature and not a feudal one. The contract here is based on ‘wages’ and not on bonded labour. The profit is reinvested in more expansion, unlike feudalism where it is consumed by the lord or to create luxury for him. Under feudalism, most of the production related decisions are taken and then executed by the serfs after which a significant portion goes to the lord and only little remains for the serfs. In this case the labourers rarely have any say in the work process and are only used for their labour power. Two more things can be added to supplement this point. The migrant force that is ready for this kind of exploitative work is itself created by uneven capitalist development in Maharashtra where the western part of the state is more industrialized and regions such as Marathwada and Vidarbha are not, becoming sources of migration. Apart from this, most of the Dalits are landless labourers but all of the landless labourers are not Dalits. This shows that capitalism has created a class of mixed form of migrant workers. The feudal process of Mukkadams (agents) hiring these people verbally and indirectly selling them to the plantation owners creates a base on which the above-mentioned capitalist dynamics work out.
Secondly, the current discourse around the reproductive rights of women is hijacked by middle-class liberal narratives which only talk about ‘choice’ of women to have children or not, and about their overall reproductive agency. In a public discourse which is loaded with slogans of abolishing the family and liberating women through technology, it should be reminded that having a stable family is a dream for all these women. Numerous reports by agencies like the BBC, Deccan herald, PARI, The Print, New York Times, etc., have pointed out the pain felt by these women made ‘wombless’. What matters primarily is the condition under which these choices are made by the majority of the working people, rather than the choice in itself. These conditions are majorly shaped by their utter poverty or what Marx deems “dull compulsion of economic relations”.
Here, progressivism should change the way it conceptualizes ‘agency’ and policies should change the nature of choices for people.
