As many as one in three women who work in the sugar fields of Maharashtra, India’s second-largest state, have had a hysterectomy—surgery to remove the uterus and often the ovaries. That staggeringly high figure has been attributed to unscrupulous doctors or cultural norms.
We revealed another reason: to keep the women working, undistracted by getting their periods in 100-degree fields with no running water, toilets or privacy. Indian politicians and companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo profit from such brutality.
This labor system controls women’s lives from the moment they hit adolescence. We documented child labor, girls being married at illegally young ages, and violently enforced debt bondage—all in the name of producing sugar.
We showed the failure of the international oversight system. And we tied sugar mills to the state’s most powerful politicians, revealing that the people who could make and enforce labor laws instead profit from abuse. Even the state’s former sugar regulator acknowledged being powerless in the face of a “clear conflict of interest.”
We spent months in villages, fields, clinics and sugar mills to piece together a uniquely brutal labor system that violates Indian law and basic human rights.
Women like Archana Ashok Chaure showed us their scars. Married at 14, she was trapped in debt, cutting sugar every year for a Coke and Pepsi supplier. Last year she had a hysterectomy. “There wasn’t any option left for me,” she said. Independent doctors reviewed her files and called it totally unnecessary.
Then, we tracked the supply chain to some of the world’s most well-known brands. Companies like Coca-Cola have known about abuses for years, yet did nothing—despite claims to rigorously police their supply chains.
