Drought is driving poor Indian women into exploitative sugar cane work in the central state of Maharashtra, with many of the migrant laborers opting to undergo unnecessary hysterectomies to work even harder, research showed on Thursday.
Years of failed monsoons, extreme heat and droughts have led residents of Beed, a district in the top sugar-producing state to leave and become day laborers on plantations, said the report by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a London-based think tank.
The research found that more than half of the Beed women who had gone to work on sugar plantations had undergone surgery to remove their uteruses compared with less than a fifth from households that had stayed in the district.