The Life on Wheels_ untold Story of Sugarcane Cutters
When Lata Waghmare was six months pregnant, she accompanied her husband to cut sugarcane in drought-prone Solapur, one of Maharashtra’s major sugarcane-growing districts. She did not miss a day of work during her pregnancy. Just five or six days after she gave birth to a girl, she resumed work, leaving her infant nearby while she and her husband toiled. One day, fearing the contractor’s anger over her stopping to tend to her child, Ms. Waghmare hurried to help load bundles of sugarcane onto a tractor. When she returned, her three-month-old daughter lay crushed beneath its wheels. Reading this story in The Hindu shook me deeply and opened my eyes towards the population or group that is so close, yet always overlooked—the sugarcane cutters in Maharashtra, who currently are around 5 lakh in population in Maharashtra alone, which is around 68% of the total. Normally, October to March lasts the harvesting season of sugarcane in Maharashtra. The harvesting industry till today r...
