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On Move for Subsistence
Soon after the festival of Diwali, that is, in the month of October, thousands of people leave their homes and their parents, and migrate to work on sugarcane factories located far away from their villages. The bullock-carts are stacked with utensils, food, bedding, clothes, and other essentials. Men, women, children and cattle get ready for this road trek. Fleets of migrants embark their journey in search for subsistence. Thousands of landless laborers and marginal farmers from the backward districts of Maharashtra join in these convoys of bullock carts moving through the interior roads of the state from one village to another, deserting their own village. (1)Approximately 450,000 laborers migrate to sugar factories every season. They migrate within the state, as well as across borders mostly to Karnataka and Gujarat (Sugar India Year Book, 08, Pune,) and with them migrate nearly 180,000 children below 14 years. (2)The land under sugarcane cultivation in Maharashtra is approximately 501000 hectares and it is well irrigated. There are about 162 sugarcane factories in the state. The crushing capacity of each sugar factory varies from 1500 to 7000 metric tons per day. A factory with a capacity to crush 5000 metric tons per day requires about 10,000, men and women laborers to cut and fetch sugarcane to the factories. It is believed that a couple cuts about 2.50 tons of sugarcane in a day. These laborers are managed by contractors. (Janarth Sakharshala, The sending villages report, 2005). After trekking down the roads for couple of days the migrants reach the factory assigned to them by their contractor. Contractors acts as a mediator between factory owner and laborers. He procures labor to the factories and creates employment opportunity to the laborers. He collects groups (tolis) of people from couple of villages, pays a certain amount in advance to the groups in return of hard labor for the sugar factories. In an instance, a settlement commences to emerge on about 50 to 60 acres of land especially designated by sugarcane cooperatives for their temporary settlement. Hundreds of green conical shaped huts like structure of about 6x6 sq. ft., made from freshly cut sugarcane tops, (green leaves of sugarcane) are formed. A family comprising of husband, wife, other members of the family and couple of children (6 months to 18 years) house in these temporary shelter for the next six months. Gradually, this temporary settlement begins to gain a look of a colony, where people from different villages reside together for single common purpose: subsistence. The factory site begins to gain an appearance of a village where vendors of all sorts join in to market their products, such as vegetable vendors, grocers, garment dealers, iron smiths, cobbler, meat and poultry vendors, alcohol vendors and such. Some cooperatives have constructed permanent shop for grocery, garments, and such, giving it a guise of a mini village. It is peculiar that these settlements have access to almost everything that the migrants would require to survive, however, it is devoid of fundamental needs such as electricity, medical services, and schools. A limited quantity of water is made available for both drinking as well as other purposes. Consequently, a common goal of livelihood contributes in making migration a destiny of thousands of people living in the underdeveloped communities of Maharashtra. Before the break of the dawn, hundreds of men, women, and children embark upon their journey to sugarcane farms. They begin to cut each cane with their sickle. They bend in their waist to cut each ripen cane few inches above its roots. This act of bending down and cutting each cane is carried on tirelessly until mid past noon. Both men and women cut the cane and load them either on their bullock-carts, or truck and other vehicles provided by the factory, which is then sent to factories. In some cases, sugarcane cutters themselves load sugarcane over their heads and walk to sugarcane factories. In this business a family is a unit, which comprise of 3-4 adults and couple of children. Once the carts and trucks are loaded, women return back to their temporary shelter to carry out household chores, while men go to the factory and line up in a queue. They are often made to wait for one to six hours before the cane is weighed and unloaded. All the sugarcane cutters are given numbers. The factory attendant weighs the sugarcane before unloading the vehicle. The weight of the cane determines the day’s work thus the unit is paid. (3)The wage rate per tonne ranges from Rs. 150 to Rs. 300 depending upon the distance between the cane field and the unit which ranges from 1 to 15 km. Men usually return to the shelter little before the sunsets. In the evening little lanterns are lit in the huts and food is served. Darkness spread through the campus, and the tired bodies touch the ground to rest with a plan to rise before break of a dawn and slog for 13 to 14 hours. Both boys and girls who accompany their parents also work in farms. They undertake minor chores such as loading the cane or collecting the sugarcane tops for their cattle. Girls usually stay back in the huts to accomplish household chores such as cleaning, cooking, fetching water, looking after younger siblings as well as guarding the hut. In the absence of girls in the family, younger boys perform these tasks. A few of these children go to the public schools located close to the factory or schools run by couple of NGOs, but others either toil in the fields or are forced to do household chores. Their parents bring them along on the site so that they can get a helping hand or earn extra income. Most of the children of the migrants are able to be educated upto the fourth grade. But after that, the village school does not promote them to higher class as they remain absent for six months of the year. The government has initiated couple of schemes under Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan to curtail school dropouts and migration of children. In spite of these schemes about 2 lakh children below the age of 14 continue to remain out of school. (4)Lambadas community were the pioneers who set this new livelihood trend by migrating seasonally to sugarcane fields in neighboring districts Sugar cutters have been cutting the canes since 1969. It is 41 years since, several communities have sought menial livelihood pattern in migration to sugarcane fields. But apart from livelihood to subsist this source of income has not enhanced social or economic development of about 5 lakh laborers. In the last four decades, neither sugar cooperatives, nor government cared to protect these labor forces. Although these migrants devotedly work with the same factories for years together they continue to be unorganized workers, who are deprived of basic needs such as shelter, electricity, water, schools and health facilities.
2 Sugar India Year Book, 08, published by Aneket Prakashan, Pune, 3 Written Evidence for the UK All Party Parliamentary Group (on Population, Development and Reproductive Health) on Population Growth: Impact on the Millennium Development Goals on From Survival to Strategy Population Growth and Migration in Semi-Arid Andhra Pradesh, India by Laxman Rao, Priya Deshingkar and John Farrington, March, 2006 4 Written Evidence for the UK All Party Parliamentary Group (on Population, Development and Reproductive Health) on Population Growth: Impact on the Millennium Development Goals on From Survival to Strategy Population Growth and Migration in Semi-Arid Andhra Pradesh, India by Laxman Rao, Priya Deshingkar and John Farrington, March, 2006
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