My colleagues and I have spent months investigating the sugar industry in the western Indian state of Maharashtra. We’ve documented illegal underage marriage, brutal working conditions and a pattern of women being coerced into unnecessary hysterectomies.
One question kept coming up: If this industry is so abusive, then why don’t workers just leave?
The answer was darker than we could have imagined.
We obtained police reports and local government records, interviewed factory owners and collected the firsthand accounts of a half dozen families.
Together, they show that workers who tried to quit jobs harvesting sugar were threatened, beaten or abducted in retaliation. In at least one case, a laborer was killed. Some of the workers said that they had been held captive within sugar mills themselves.
They and their families told us that the authorities were of little help. Many still live in fear of further retaliation.
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