Primitive Accumulation Proceeding Apace

 The Paschim Bharat Majdur Adhikar Manch reports -

This year Jagrit Adivasi Dalit Sangathan, a people’s organization active in South Western (Nimad) region of Madhya Pradesh has received several complaints from Bhil Adivasi workers of Barwani and Khargone districts who have gone to harvest sugarcane in Maharashtra and Karnataka. The workers were recruited by contractors of Beed district in Maharashtra, whose modus operandi is as follows: A sum of Rs 30,000 – 40,000 is advanced to an Adivasi family in the lean summer months and in return for this loan, the couple is required to work in harvesting and loading sugarcane from October for an unspecified period. Children also accompany their parents. With the worsening economic situation due to inflation, agricultural crisis and near collapse of the MNREGS, more and more Adivasi families are falling into this debt trap. Such cases have also been reported by other grass roots people’s organizations based in the area – Veer Khaja Nayak Manav Vikas Pratishthan in Sendhwa in Madhya Pradesh and Vichardhara Sansthan in Nandurbar, Maharashtra. All the three organizations are part of the Paschim Bharat Majdur Adhikar Manch, a network of trade unions and grass roots organizations that seeks to ensure labour and human rights for migrant Adivasi workers of Central India. The Adivasis now constitute the main agricultural work force in the black cotton soil region of peninsular India. 

The workers have now spent more than three months harvesting and loading sugarcane in conditions of practically slave labour. They do harvesting work for more than 10 hours from dawn to dusk and then they loadthe cane onto the transport vehicles till late at night, often working till 1 to 2 am at night, and are sometimes not even allowed enough time to eat their food properly. They thus work for 16-20 hours a day! They stay in tents of plastic sheets in the open fields. They have not been paid any wages and have been only given very inadequate sums of money or some grain for food and all workers are complaining of hunger. When the workers are asking for accounts of how much they are to be paid after the reconciliation of the loan advance they had taken, they are simply told that the advance amount has not been adjusted yet and they will have to work for many more months. When workers insist on “hisaab” (wage calculations) and say they want to go back, they are threatened and abused, and are told they can only return if they pay a few lakhs of Rupees to the contractor. On 16^th January, 2022, upon asking for “hisaab”, three members of a group in Belagavi in Karnataka had been held as “hostages” and locked up in the Nirani Sugar factory in Mudhol Bagalkot district for 6 days and were only released after the informal intervention of the Barwani district administration.

Pregnant women, women who have delivered a baby only a few days ago, those with injuries and children are also being made to work. Last month a group from district Khargone that escaped from Belagavi came back and reported that 3 women and 3 minor girls were repeatedly sexually assaulted by the contractors in the sugarcane fields. It was with great difficulty that an FIR was finally registered by Khargone police, but no action has been taken yet.

The situation of these workers is that of bonded labour according to the provisions of the Bonded Labour System (Abolition) Act 1976 and there is also blatant violation of the provisions of the Inter-State Migrant Workmen (Regulation of Employment and Conditions of Service) Act (which requires licensing of contractors, registration of workers in both states, payment of minimum wages, provision of basic amenities and a passbook recording work and wages). This is also a case of trafficking as defined by section 370 and 374 of the Indian Penal Code, an atrocity under the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, violation of the Contract Labour Act, Prohibition of Child Labour Act, Minimum Wages Act, Payment of Wages Act and many other labour laws. However, the authorities in both the source districts as well as the destination area are reluctant to take action.

While the Sangathan and other civil society activists in Karnataka have been demanding legal action, this is not being done, even in cases such as when the Barwani administration rescued workers from Vijayapura. In none of these cases has the proper procedure prescribed by the National Human Rights Commission for release of bonded laborers been followed. The released workers have to be provided a Release Certificate that entitles them to rehabilitation from the Government. The administration needs to provide an immediate relief amount and arrange for their return journey. In the latest case, the Belagavi district administration dumped a group of Adivasi families comprising 57 persons on the train to Solapur with the same contractor who was forcing them to work in bondage!! The workers had no money to even buy their food. They had to be rescued by civil society organisations and sent back to their homes from Solapur. The three organizations have currently received many complaints from groups of workers in Pune, Baramati, Kolhapur and Satara in Maharashtra and Bagalkot, Belagavi, and Kalburgi in Karnataka seeking release and return. Three of these groups for which data is available, comprise of 200 persons including women and children.

Sugar industry in peninsular India is organized very differently from North India. Majority of the sugar factories are owned by sugarcane farmers cooperatives. The leaders of sugar cooperatives control the politics of a state like Maharashtra and wield considerable influence in other states like Gujarat and Karnataka where the same pattern is prevalent. One major way in which sugar industry is organized differently is in the method of harvesting sugarcane. In North India, the farmers harvest the sugarcane in their fields and bring it to the factory gate. In cooperative factories of peninsular India, the factory takes responsibility of getting the sugarcane cut and transported to the factory. This requires humanpower on a large scale. Sugarcane harvesting is highly labour intensive. The sugarcane cooperatives have set up elaborate mechanisms to recruit cheap labour for harvesting work from remote areas. Workers are given advances that tie them up to work for the whole harvesting season at very low piece rates. The workers live in temporary hutments, often made of polythene and move from field to field harvesting sugarcane. The unit of work is a couple so children also migrate with their families. Camps of harvesting workers give the appearance of temporary villages from pre historic times. There are no facilities like electricity, drinking water and sanitation.

Bondage like work conditions for sugarcane harvesting work have made the news repeatedly over the last decade. Couple of years back, Beed district, the major source of sugarcane harvesting workers in Maharashtra was in the news with female workers being enticed to undergo the hysterectomy operation. The operation ensured that they continued to work uninterrupted in sugarcane harvesting, without pregnancy leading to work breaks (https://www.newslaundry.com/2019/07/31/a-slaughterhouse-for-wombs-district-beed-maharashtra). Centre for Labor Research and Action (CLRA), a labor rights NGO working in the state of Gujarat for more than a decade, wrote about bondage conditions prevalent amongst sugarcane harvesting workers of South Gujarat, where the workers are recruited against advances at usurious interest rates. One and a half times advance has to be paid back at the end of the season that works out to an almost five percent monthly interest rate (https://www.newsclick.in/sugarcane-harvesters-south-gujarat-are-trapped-bondage-one-generation-after-another).

The roots of the bondage lie in extremely low piece rates. To establish the energy consumed and time taken in harvesting one ton of sugarcane, CLRA sponsored a Time Motion study by Industrial Design Centre (IDC) of Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The study report was submitted in the year 2019 (http://clra.in/files/documents/9f1d468e-b3e3-4a4b-8c88-ecaf295c2a2c.pdf). After intensive field studies, the study estimated the time taken to cut, bundle, and transport to the truck, one ton of sugarcane as 13.7 hours. Per day production for an eight-hour day for one person works out to be 0.58 ton. The minimum wage for sugarcane harvesting work was Rs. 238 per ton. Thus, per day wage for sugarcane harvesting workers turns out to be Rs. 138. This is 40 percent of the statutory minimum wage rate for agriculture workers in Gujarat that is Rs. 340. Similar situation prevails in states like Maharashtra and Karnataka. The workers’ union Majur Adhikar Manch has now filed a petition in the High Court of Gujarat demanding that the minimum piece rate wages be hiked to Rs. 586 per ton.

In the case of the Adivasi workers now stranded in Maharashtra and Karnataka, even the piece rate is not being invoked, they are simply informed that their debt has not been repaid yet! While debt bondage has been passed down since generations amongst the dalit and Adivasi workers of Central India engaged in sugarcane harvesting work, it is the first time that a large number of workers have raised their voice against this stark exploitation. Adivasis from several villages have started campaigning against this bondage in support of the victims. They are demanding strict legal action.  It is now the bounden duty of the state and civil society to ensure that one of the most vulnerable sections of the working class gets its due.

Nitin Varghese (7869090287), Jayshree (8889289196), Tatyaji Pawar (9421470711), Sudhir Katiyar (94141296542)