When his daughter turned 12, Gighe Dutta decided this would be the year that he and his wife quit cutting sugar cane in the fields of western India. The work required a long migration, and his daughter would have to drop out of school — the first step for many girls on a lifelong path of abuse and poverty.

But his employer refused to let them quit. He and his friends beat up Dutta and forced him into a car, Dutta said. According to a report that he filed with a local government agency, the men drove him to a mill that says it supplies sugar to many international companies.

Dutta was locked there for two days, he said, and left to sleep on the floor to reconsider his decision.

The sugar-rich state of Maharashtra supplies companies like Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Unilever. Local politicians and sugar barons say that laborers like the Duttas are free to leave. The work is hard, they concede, but laborers can always seek work elsewhere.

But the sugar workers of Maharashtra are far from free. With no written contracts, they are at the mercy of their employers to decide when they may leave. They frequently work under the threat of violence, abduction and murder.

There is no official data about how often such treatment occurs, and abuses often go unreported because workers fear retaliation. But workers’ rights groups, local government authorities, experts and even some mill owners say that kidnapping is not uncommon and that workers have little recourse.

The New York Times and Fuller Project obtained police reports and local government records, interviewed factory owners and collected the firsthand accounts of a half dozen families involved in recent kidnapping cases.

“Some say they will murder you. People say all sorts of things,” said Vinobai Taktode, a laborer who reported to police that her husband had been kidnapped by his employer. “There are so many fears on our minds.”

Earlier this year, the Times and Fuller Project revealed that household-name companies and Indian politicians profit off a brutal system that forces children to work, pushes them into underage marriages and coerces women to get unnecessary hysterectomies to keep them working in the fields, unencumbered by menstruation or routine ailments.

All of those abuses can be linked to what is known as bonded labor, a system in which workers are perpetually in debt to their employers and cannot leave.

Bonded labor, or debt bondage, is an internationally recognized human rights violation. It is illegal in India and explicitly denounced by the Western companies that buy sugar from Maharashtra.

Yet worker abuse in Maharashtra is hardly a secret. Bonded labor is endemic across the state, according to researchers, industry officials and workers’ rights groups. A court-appointed government fact-finding team found last year that the sugar industry relies on an extensive system of bonded labor, according to a document obtained by the Times and Fuller Project.

Several Western brands that source from Maharashtra either declined to comment or pointed to their published human rights policies without addressing the issue of bonded labor in Maharashtra.

Far from addressing the problem, the Maharashtra government denies that it exists. A court affidavit submitted this year on behalf of several state agencies said that sugar laborers were “free to move anywhere and they are never imprisoned by the employer.”

The mill where Dutta says he was held, Jaywant Sugars, denied any involvement. The mill has many customers and has supplied Sucden, a major commodity broker that says it commands 15% of the global sugar trade.

In response to questions, Sucden said that it had not purchased from Jaywant Sugars since 2020. Sucden said that the mill had signed a code of conduct assuring that no labor abuses were involved in its operations. Sucden said that it would not source from Jaywant again without “clear and documented prior clarification on labor practices.”

Debt bondage persists because sugar cutters in Maharashtra are paid through cash advances at the beginning of each season. Almost invariably, according to laborers and contractors alike, it is impossible to repay the money in a single year. The debt rolls over, and families are trapped, typically with no contract and no recourse.

Violence can occur when workers try to break that cycle.

One sugar cutter, Prahlad Pawar, said that his employer told him last year that he and others had not worked hard enough during the harvest.

So the employer ordered Pawar, his wife and children, and another family to work as his personal servants during the offseason, according to a report filed with a local government agency and interviews with family members. Pawar and his family eventually escaped, hiking for days toward their village, begging for food and sleeping in fields.

“People in the cities, who drink these cold drinks and eat chocolates, they are living their lives and they do not even think of us,” Pawar said. “I wish they, for once, tried working like us.”

Women Pay the Price

Vinobai Taktode isn’t sure how old she is — maybe 30, she said, or 35. Like many female sugar cane cutters, nobody had recorded her birthday.

She lives in the village of Alepur, many hours’ drive from Dutta’s family. But, like Dutta’s preteen daughter, she had grown up among the crops, doing chores for her parents along with her siblings.

Unlike Dutta, her parents had not sought a way out. When she was in her early or midteens, she was married to a man who cut sugar cane, too.

In Maharashtra, the crop is generally cut by a husband-and-wife team known as a koyta. Each couple supplies a specific sugar mill but is hired by a middleman contractor who doles out the mill’s money every season.

Lump-sum payments allow workers to pay for major costs like home repairs or medical expenses. But most agricultural workers have only oral agreements and no recourse if their contractors change the terms. Sugar mills deny any relationship with the workers or any responsibility for their treatment.

“Labor is completely invisible, and that invisibility is critical for profit making,” said Seema Kulkarni of Makaam, a group that advocates on behalf of female farmworkers in India.

Taktode, her husband and five children struggled financially. She does not know all the details because, as in most farming couples, her husband made all the arrangements with the contractor.

But her husband, Shivaji Bhivaji Taktode, battled alcoholism. Years ago, he missed two weeks of work while bingeing on a sticky, sweet country wine made from molasses. Every night for days, she said in an interview, the contractor and half a dozen friends roughed up Taktode’s husband for not working.

One night, she recalled, someone beat him with the blunt side of a scythe, the tool used to cut cane. Her husband’s back was covered in bruises. Another night, she said, a man knocked him on the head with a rock, sending him to the hospital.

It was then that Taktode learned that, while the men control the finances, women and children can pay the price. The contractor forced Taktode and her eldest son to do days of extra work in the sugar fields, she said.

But that still wasn’t enough to make up for the lost time.

The contractor told Taktode that her husband had stolen from him by missing work, she said. She was terrified. They had no records and no way to calculate their labor, their debt or a way out.

She knew they had to escape.

“They used to threaten us,” she said. She remembers her contractor saying, “If you leave, we will kill you.”

Late one night in 2022, the family bundled up some possessions and slipped away, marching for hours, she said, through “a jungle” of rustling sugar cane until they reached a train station. When her 6-year-old son could no longer walk, Taktode carried him.

After two years in hiding, they returned home this summer, assuming that things had quieted down.

They were wrong. The contractor showed up again in late August and forced her husband into a car. A relative recalled having witnessed the abduction and recounted the details, which were also listed in a police report.

The contractor could not be reached despite repeated phone calls. The mill for which he worked declined a request for an interview.

Taktode, though, said that the contractor had called her family and demanded money for her husband’s release.

Then, this fall, Shivaji Taktode returned, shaken up and badly injured, his son said. He escaped, his family said, but details were few. The contractor’s mobile phone was switched off.

It is unclear whether that was the end of Vinobai Taktode’s ordeal. They are destitute. Food is scarce. When it rains, droplets of water seep through gaps in the tin roof of her mother-in-law’s home, turning the dirt floor to mud.

If the contractor returns, Taktode says she has no idea how they will find the money.

A Father’s Desperation

Dutta and his wife are desperate to avoid the harsh life of sugar cane cutting for their children. This fall, they decided that they would not migrate for the harvest as usual. They were done.

Their daughter was finishing primary school and they wanted her to take her classes seriously. Dutta never got the education he wanted. “I need to educate them. Both my kids,” he said.

But by the time they had decided to quit, they had already taken their yearly advance. For most workers, that would be the end of it. They would have to return to the fields.

The Duttas, though, had scratched together some money by farming cotton, millet and lentils in the offseason.

Dutta arranged a meeting with his contractor. He offered to repay 70% of the advance upfront, then return with the rest in a few days.

The contractor, who had been drinking with friends, was furious, Dutta recounted. He demanded that Dutta pay back double the advance if he wanted to quit. They argued, and the contractor and his friends turned on Dutta, beating him up.

Dutta’s contractor did not respond to repeated calls for comment.

“There were eight to 10 people, and they were all drinking. Who listens after drinking?” Dutta said in an interview, biting his nails as he spoke. “I was alone.”

They pushed him into a car, took his phone away and began to drive southeast. It was half a day’s drive before they arrived at the Jaywant Sugar mill, he said.

Like most of Maharashtra’s mills, Jaywant is controlled by a politically powerful family.

The mill’s president, C.N. Deshpande, denied that anyone had been held against their will at his factory. He said he knew nothing about Dutta.

But he acknowledged that sugar laborers who refuse to work or cannot repay their advances posed a problem. Ultimately, the mill’s money is at stake. “Contractors come and say that laborers have run away,” Deshpande said. They ask what to do, he added. “We tell them we don’t know, but we need the money.”

Kidnappings and beatings were common in the industry, he said. Often, he added, mill executives know about these tactics or abet them. And he acknowledged that the mills rarely faced consequences.

Some laborers have even been murdered, he said. In one case in 2014, a contractor beat and abducted a worker, then stabbed his son in the chest, according to arrest records and an interview with the family.

Deshpande’s mill does not use violence or threats, he said. But, he noted, he has never failed to recoup an advance.

Escape

Dutta, weak from hunger and his beating, was taken to a dark room without furniture, he later told a government legal aid agency. Over the next two days, he was let out only to use the bathroom.

He said that, despite Deshpande’s denial, mill workers had seen what was happening. One was even assigned to bring him meals from the canteen but threatened him when he begged to be released.

Dutta had no idea when, or if, he’d be freed.

“I was so scared,” he said. “I could not think, it was as if my head had stopped working.”

When he could focus, he was torn up by thoughts of his mother, wife and children and how worried they must be. He thought of his daughter, he said, a shy girl who liked animals and who hand-fed the family’s goat.

After two days, Dutta’s brother discovered what had happened. He phoned the contractor, who reiterated his demand — twice his money back. In response, Dutta’s brother and wife filed a police report.

The contractor told Dutta that it was time to leave and ushered him to a car. Dutta was terrified about where they were taking him, he said. At a roadside stop, he made a break for it.

He arrived home about a week later and filed a report with the legal aid agency.

Weeks passed and nothing happened.

When reporters inquired, police played down the incident and said that Dutta and the contractor were working things out.

Dutta said he was afraid that the contractor would return for him. But he and his wife are adamant that they will not return to sugar cane cutting.

Decades of farm labor harms your body irreparably. Dutta can feel it in his knuckles and at the base of his spine. His wife is no different.

Harvesting cotton and millet for a living will be painful, too. And it had never before generated enough money to live on. But Dutta said that didn’t matter. “In any work, one has to suffer,” he said.

He would make sure his daughter stayed in school, he said — whatever it took.

New York Times News Service