Anish Moonka@anishmoonka
843 women in Beed, India had their uterus surgically removed in 2024, right before they went to cut sugarcane. 477 of them were aged 30 to 35. The Maharashtra government's own health survey, published in June 2025, said so.
The surgeries are about money. In Beed, a man and his wife sign up as a working pair, locally called a koyta (the sickle they use). A middleman called a mukadam gives them an upfront payment of Rs 50,000 to 60,000 (about $520 to $625) for a six-month sugarcane season. To work that off, the couple has to cut and load two tonnes of cane every single day, for 12 to 14 hours, with no day off all week. The mukadam keeps 15 to 25 percent of the hiring amount plus another 30 percent of what the couple earns. The fine for missing a day is Rs 250 to 500. A woman who takes one day off when her period is bad can lose almost a week of take-home pay.
The mill that buys the cane is legally separate from all of it. The mill just sells the sugar. Maharashtra has 210 sugar mills and is finishing the 2025-26 season near 10 million tonnes of sugar produced. The buyers include Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Mondelez (which owns Cadbury), and Unilever. A 2024 New York Times and Fuller Project investigation traced the chain through two big sugar companies, Dalmia Bharat Sugar and NSL Sugars. Both fed into mills carrying the industry's main ethical stamp, called Bonsucro. Its audits caught none of it. The Times found everything those audits missed, in months.
Back in 2019, a government investigation surveyed 82,309 women cane cutters in Beed. 13,861 of them, 17 percent, had had their uterus removed. A 2024 study by the IIED, an international research group, looked harder at 423 households in Beed. In households where the women had migrated for cane work, 55.73 percent had had a hysterectomy. Where the women had stayed home, the figure was 17.06 percent. Across all of India, the national rate for women aged 15 to 49 is 3.2 percent.
After the 2024 reporting: Mondelez quietly cut ties with Dalmia. Coca-Cola launched a worker-training program in 4 mills. PepsiCo blocked a shareholder vote in February 2025, using a US rule that lets companies skip votes on parts of their business worth less than 5 percent of revenue. The US Department of Labor added Beed sugar to its list of products made using forced labour. Maharashtra set up another committee on February 25, 2026, seven years after its first one.
In those seven years, the sugar kept coming. The system that produces the hysterectomies is the same system that produces the sugar in the soda cans on the shelf. Both are still working exactly as they were built.
