BEED, India—Without informing their parents, 13-year-old Nitesh and his friends hopped into a car with a man and went for a drive. When the minutes turned to an hour, Nitesh suspected that something was very wrong. He protested, and was stopped from leaving. He and his friends were driven 500 kilometres away from their remote village all the way to the sugarcane fields of Beed in India’s Maharashtra state.
Before the car ride, Nitesh and his friends were approached by a man who identified himself as a labour contractor, and offered them work. He promised each of them Rs 5,000 ($61) a month along with new mobile phones. They thought they’d be working part-time in their village and the money would help their cash-strapped parents.
When they reached their destination, they were handed over to another labour contractor who took to them to sugarcane fields where they worked for weeks in brutal conditions.
“We were made to work in the sugarcane fields from 5 a.m until 6 p.m.” Nitesh, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, told VICE News. When the boys demanded to be returned to their parents, they were beaten and threatened. They were never paid for their work.
Nitesh and his friends were recently rescued and a criminal case was registered against the labour contractor. The children were kept in a safe house until they were handed over to their guardians. But many more children are still working in India’s lucrative sugar fields that bring in $4 billion every year from raw sugar exports alone. There is no government initiate to rescue them.
While India boasts of huge profits from its sugar exports, activists have raised concerns over the exploitation of workers at the bottom of the supply chain. According to Oxfam, millions of sugarcane cutters work under hazardous conditions and some of them are tricked into debt and kept as forced or bonded labour. These workers include thousands of children like Nitesh.
India is one of the world’s largest producers of sugar and is the second-largest sugar exporter globally, right after Brazil. Despite the massive scale of the country’s sugar industry, it is currently unclear how many children work in it. According to government data, there are 50 million farm workers cultivating sugarcane across the country and some sample studies suggest a third of those workers are children.
According to Dhananjay Tingal, the executive director of child rights movement, Bachpan Bachao Andolan, his team found children working in sugarcane fields in previous studies. “In Maharashtra, children are being trafficked from Rajasthan and other parts of India to work in the sugarcane fields,” Tingal said.
The data on child workers in India varies widely. According to UNICEF, there are over 10.2 million children between the ages of 5-14 working in India. Local child rights organisations put the number of child workers closer to 60 million.
The largest share of child workers is found in unpaid family work in the agriculture sector. A report by the non-profit organisation Oxfam revealed that nearly 200,000 children below the age of 14 join their parents in sugar cane harvesting in Maharashtra every year and over half of them are 6 to14 years of age. The report noted that these children are drawn into the workforce from an early age and by the time they are 11 years old, they work full-time.
Millions of workers migrate each year with their children from different regions of India to sugarcane regions like Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and Karnataka. Maharashtra’s Beed region is particularly known for its thousands of sugarcane cutters who migrate each sugar season from neighbouring states. Many families work with their children under extreme heat without access to healthcare facilities, adequate shade or accommodations, and access to existing government’s welfare schemes. Many work without access to clean water, toilets or electricity.
And in some cases workers don’t have adequate access to food. “We only used to eat rice once or twice a day,” 13-year-old Sagar told VICE News. Like Nitesh, Sagar was also rescued from the sugarcane fields in Beed and his name has been changed to protect his identity.
Sugarcane cutting is a physically demanding task which becomes even more difficult in the region’s increasing heatwaves. Child workers are also required to carry heavy stacks of sugarcane to trucks, often parked several hundred metres from the fields. The harsh realities of their work conditions are compounded by the absence of legal protections.
Several reports in recent years have revealed that many migrant workers are trapped in huge debt as bonded or forced labour that they are unable to repay. A report by Oxfam noted that despite working for over 12 to 18 hours a day, the workers are often unable to clear their dues and end up in a vicious cycle of debt. It also said that, “most of the workers interviewed reported having dues ranging from INR 55,000 ($665) to 100,000 ($1,200) from the previous season.”
A report by the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai noted that Beed has emerged as a hub for the trafficking of young girls to the state of Karnataka for sugarcane cutting. The study mentioned the case of a 15-year-old girl from Beed who was kept under bondage for two years because her parents were unable to repay their loans.
After her rescue, and Nitesh and Sagar’s rescue, their future seems uncertain. There is the trauma they have to recover from, and the continued financial trauma that made them vulnerable in the first place.
“The government should constitute a welfare board for the financial security and improvement of the standard of living of sugarcane workers rescued from bonded labour,” Tangade told VICE News.
Currently, there are only a few non profit organisations with limited resources rescuing children from bonded labour in India’s sugar fields. But activists hope the government will recognise the scale of the exploitation, start an initiative to rescue child sugarcane workers and set up rehabilitation programmes for children like Nitesh.