One in three. 36% of women working in the fields of the Beed district, the main cane sugar production area in India, suffer, sometimes even when they are very young, in their twenties, hysterectomy, surgery which consists in the removal of the uterus and which causes premature menopause. The issuer France Tèlèvisionsin the program Envoyé specialinvestigated to understand why this happens, and they found that these female workers they do it to stay productive: childless and menstruating they do not need leave, nor to slow down.
The hiring for cutting sugar cane in the south of the country begins at the beginning of October: the season lasts six months and employs more than a million workers. The recruiters, the ‘mukadams’, have a responsibility to ensure their productivity. Half of the people hired are womenand they work in the fields since they were 10 years oldin extremely harsh conditions: they get up at 3 in the morning, to work ten hours in the sun scorching, with only one day off per month.
Women who undergo total hysterectomy (with the removal of the ovaries) age prematurely: at 30, they seem to be 50.
The team of Envoyé special followed them in one of the tent cities set up by the sugar refineries, without running water or electricity, where they will live for the entire semester of collection. One of them, Reka, is 20 years old and is already thinking about having her uterus removed. She complains of recurrent and violent pains, she is continually exhausted, she has a stomach ache.
Many other workers find themselves in the same situation. The mukadam then recommends hysterectomy for them. The cost of the operation is borne by the women, who do not receive the salary during the hospitalization. “If they don’t remove the uterus,” the mukadam told reporters from Envoyé special, for us it is a problem. They are less productive. And if they get cancer, they become useless“.
The women confirm: «Our mukadam yells at us if we don’t work hard enough. He beats us, even severely. Even when we are very sick, he beats us. Shout out to our husbands that we are not working hard enough and that we have to repay our salary. ‘
Recruiters seem to regard hysterectomy as a trivial operation. Thousands of women, fearful of losing their jobs, allow themselves to be persuaded to undergo an irreversible operation which, in the rest of India and the world, it affects just 3% of women and is generally only performed on patients over 50 years of age. A completely useless sacrifice, however, because the physical conditions of the workers in the sugar cane fields will only get worse with premature menopause.
“Are women or cows safer in India?”
Source: Vanity Fair
