How We Investigated Political Ties to Abuse in India, and What We Found

Western companies such as Coca-Cola buy sugar from fields where workers suffer abuses. But the country has labor laws. Where was the government?

When my colleagues and I began investigating labor abuses among sugar cane cutters in the western Indian state of Maharashtra, we were startled by how open it all was.

Debt bondage, child labor and coerced hysterectomies happened in plain sight. We traveled from village to village in the arid, impoverished region of Beed. Every worker we talked to had either witnessed or suffered from abuses.

But for decades, little had been done. Big Western brands such as Coca-Cola knew that workers were being exploited, yet continued to buy sugar from the region. A sugar industry group even gave a mill its seal of approval despite easily identified links to abuses.

Workers told us that they felt abandoned by their government, left to fend for themselves as they struggled to feed their families. Women showed us their hysterectomy scars and told us that they had gotten the surgery because they could not miss work for routine gynecological care.

Debt bondage is illegal. Child labor is, too. India has a minimum wage and labor laws.

So, where was the government?

Here’s How We Did It

Almost everyone we interviewed described links between the state’s political leadership and the sugar industry, but we wanted to quantify that connection.

Sandip Sukhtankar, a University of Virginia economics professor who has studied the subject, suggested we look for yearbooks from an industry association in Maharashtra.

That didn’t work out, but my reporting partner, Qadri Inzamam at The Fuller Project, discovered that the Sugar Technologists’ Association of India published almanacs every year. In them, he found the names of hundreds of Maharashtra mill leaders.

We then manually cross-checked those names against lists of elected officials, government websites and social media pages. We found that most mill executives were political figures, including current and former members of the Indian Parliament and at least 21 state lawmakers — five of whom sit in the state’s powerful cabinet of ministers. Dozens more were former state lawmakers. Others were elected to local office. Still others were close relatives of politicians.

It is tough to overstate how deeply entrenched the sugar industry is in Maharashtra politics. Our lists included some of the state’s most prominent figures, members of political dynasties that stretch for generations.

Shekhar Gaikwad, a former top regulator of sugar in Maharashtra, summed it up this way: “It’s a clear conflict of interest.”

Who’s Responsible?

At the heart of the issue is the question of who employs the sugar cane cutters. These migrant workers are hired by contractors — go-betweens employed by the mills. The workers move from farm to farm during harvest time.

They have no access to basic facilities such as toilets or running water, and they live in makeshift tarpaulin tents. Instead of wages, they borrow money at the beginning of the season and work off their debt. It’s pretty much impossible, the contractors told us, to pay debt off within a single season, which means workers must return year after year.

Sugar mill executives argue that they do not employ the workers and are not responsible for their welfare. They point the finger at the contractors, who in turn say that they are merely acting on behalf of the mills.

If the government decided that the sugar mills were, in fact, the ultimate employer, the mills would most likely be required to adhere to Indian laws governing minimum wages and benefits.

Sugar mill owners do not want that.

How Did This Come to Be?

Leadership over cooperative sugar mills has been a path into politics for generations of lawmakers.

It “confers prestige and provides access to patronage and power,” the scholar B.R. Baviskar wrote in his 1980 book about how the sugar mills influenced the development of Maharashtra’s politics.

That was nearly half a century ago, and local politicians told us that the relationship between sugar and politics remained beneficial and drove economic growth. They rejected the suggestion of a conflict between their political positions and their industry roles.

“If a sugar factory and a lawmaker are on the same page, for instance, it’s not an issue,” said Balasaheb Thorat, a former state revenue minister with longstanding ties to the sugar industry.

But for the laborers at the very bottom of the supply chain, the relationship has been disastrous.

The Government Falsely Denies Abuses

Maharashtra’s top court has taken an interest in the welfare of the sugar cane cutters. A judge opened a case and asked for input from industry leaders, labor activists and government officials.

We reviewed a document, submitted to the court on behalf of the government, that showed agencies downplayed how widespread hysterectomies were in the sugar fields.

The document also falsely denied that workers were trapped in debt, saying that they were “free to move.” That is contradicted by every worker we interviewed and by the contractors themselves.

The same document said that children did not cut sugar cane. Again, nearly every worker we interviewed either witnessed child labor or began work as children themselves. Our photographer even witnessed children cutting cane.