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Physical labour is not respected in India. Farm labourers are one of the most exploited labourers in India, and the world. Every year more than one million unorganised contract labourers, most of them from lower castes, migrate to the sugar belt in Western Maharashtra for around six months where sugar factories are concentrated. With around 200 sugar factories, Maharashtra ranks number one in sugar production in India. The labourers work for twelve or more hours a day and get poor returns. On the other hand, the working and living conditions violate basic human rights (Deshingkar, Start, 2003). Cane cutting is the most laborious farm work where the labourers have to bend for hours, pick up very heavy cane bundles and mount them at risky heights even during the night time. While injuries are very common among these labourers, occasionally, deaths too take place. The most recent reports reveal that the contractors force women labourers to remove their wombs so that they do not menstruate while working and therefore miss work. The number of such women estimates to around 30%. “Networks working on health and women’s issues say unwarranted hysterectomies among poor women in Beed and other places are the result of work-related pressures imposed on women, plus a grossly unregulated private medical sector and exploitative contractors and sugar factory owners who hire migrant workers” (Chatterjee, 2019).  Along with such health hazards, activists claim that women labourers are exploited by the male contractors at the worksite where physical abuse and rapes happen quite often though they are not formally reported. Young children of the labourers also travel with them at the destination leaving their schools and education behind to help their parents in their work to get trapped into the vicious cycle of bonded labour like their parents (making it a generation after generation trap). Marginalised, alienated and vulnerable in the migrated socio-cultural environment, the sugarcane harvesting backward class labourers face livelihood insecurities. Pregnant women and children have to work. Exploitation is both obvious and subtle. Still this seasonal life is a better opportunity for them. The hardly shared realities, including, women’s critical health issues, sexual exploitation, rapes among other sensitive issues of their lives are beyond imagination. This paper studies the observations made while making a documentary film (which is an ethnographic exploration) on migrant labourers’ challenges. Using an autoethnographic framework on part of the authors, this research paper will attempt to capture their fears, insecurities, subtle voice as well as the silences.

Documenting Migrant Lives of Sugarcane Harvesting Labourers in Maharashtra– Autoethnographic Reflections