Bitter truths in Maharashtra’s sugar fields Premium

There needs to be intervention in Maharashtra to ensure that seasonal migrants have access to justice and are guaranteed safe and healthy working and living conditions

The High Court of Bombay has recently taken suo motu cognisance of the exploitation of the intra-State workforce that migrates seasonally from the drought-affected and water-scarce regions of Marathwada to the sugar-belt region of western Maharashtra. Maharashtra is one of the top sugar producers in India. According to the Maharashtra Sugar Commissioner, in 2022-23, the net area under sugar cane was 1.487 million hectares, and there were 203 crushing factories in the State that were expected to produce 138 lakh metric tons of sugar.

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Though intra-State migrant workers form the backbone of the sugar cane industry and economic growth, they have remained critically marginalised and oppressed for several decades. Considering the precarity of this migrant workforce, the High Court asked the Maharashtra government to form a committee of officers from various departments (with one nodal officer) to address their issues. Against this background, it would be critical to examine how ‘seriously’ the State develops policies and consistently implements strategic measures and existing labour laws for the effective inclusion of this precarious migrant group.

To deal with the prolonged unemployment after the sowing of rabi crops, millions of small and marginal peasant households from Beed, Jalna, Osmanabad, Latur, Nanded and Parbhani districts of the Marathwada region migrate to the sugar-belt districts such as Sangli, Kolhapur, Pune, Satara, Solapur and Ahmednagar to work in sugar cane harvesting and factories. Prolonged drought conditions, repeated crop failure, debt, and acute unemployment create an end-most situation for Marathwada’s rural labour, and, ultimately, they have to migrate seasonally. Therefore, there needs to be a long-term and comprehensive policy to address their vulnerability at both the source and destination.

The State government has to intervene in the prevalent exploitative structure of recruiting migrant workers in the sugar cane industry filed through the ‘Mukadam’ (labour contractor). The Mukadam has a contract with sugar factories to supply ‘Koytas’ (labour couples) and takes an advance to pay workers. The Mukadam system assures sugar factories a supply of a large volume of temporary, cheap, reliable, and efficient workforce (Breman, 1978). Because of eco-political reasons, the Mukadam system remains the focal point; migrant workers are very dependent on the Mukadam. Consequently, it creates adequate space to control migrant workers, violates labour laws, and is unfavourable to establish any relationship between the factory and workers.

Inadequate data is the stumbling block in framing meaningful policies for seasonal migrants, especially when women migrants and children are largely invisible and un-enumerated. Hence, a periodic and time-bound enumerating exercise is critical to create a databank of seasonal migrants that is credible. A technology-aided Migration Tracking System (MTS) application was launched in 2022 by the Women and Child Development Department of the Maharashtra government, which was said to be the first-of-its-kind project in the country.

The MTS initially focused on seasonal migrants in the tribal districts to enumerate and track children, pregnant women, and lactating mothers at source and destination areas to ensure nutrition, immunisation and early childhood care, and continuity of the Integrated Child Development Services.