ABSTRACT
This article delves into a distressing crisis in Beed district, Maharashtra, India, where a high number of hysterectomies are performed on women engaged in sugarcane cutting. Sugarcane cutting involves gruelling 12–13-hour daily toil, with husbands and wives working together. Women bear additional burdens, including unpaid domestic work and coercive hours. Substandard living conditions, poor sanitation, and water scarcity exacerbate health problems, including menstrual hygiene challenges and reproductive complications. Sugarcane’s political economy in Maharashtra involves alliances among growers, factory owners, and political parties prioritizing water-intensive sugarcane over food crops despite widespread drought risks and overall water scarcity. These unnecessary hysterectomies reveal deeper pathologies within social and medical systems. This extends beyond biological reproduction, highlighting the exploitation of migrant workers and commodification of women’s bodies in both production and social consumption sectors. The article calls into question the distorted model of market-driven water and agriculture development that perpetuates such crises in social reproduction. The organization of women cane cutters in Maharashtra is now advocating for meaningful employment opportunities in their home districts, to reduce the need for migration. They are demanding reassessment of water, agriculture, and energy policies to prioritise food and nutritional security, as well as rational, quality health care and ecologically sound local employment. These efforts are challenging regressive social structures and policy frameworks, towards improving the lives of women sugarcane harvesting workers and reshaping the terms of their work.
