Migrant Cane-Cutters: Sugar's Hidden Workforce

Imagine sugarcane harvesting in large parts of India still depending overwhelmingly on manual labour, workers cutting cane stalk by stalk with hand tools rather than mechanised harvesters, and that labour being supplied largely by seasonal migrant workers, entire families travelling from drought-prone regions of Maharashtra and neighbouring states to cane-growing districts for the several-month crushing season, living in temporary encampments near the fields they're cutting.

This migrant workforce operates largely outside the formal employment protections covering the roughly 5 lakh workers directly employed by sugar mills themselves, covered under the broader industry employment discussion elsewhere on this site, cane-cutting labour contracts are typically negotiated through intermediary labour contractors called mukadams, with payment often structured per tonne of cane cut by a labouring couple or family unit jointly, rather than as individual formal wages.

Women make up a disproportionate share of this workforce, both as primary cane-cutters and in the roughly six crore sugarcane farming households nationally where women often perform the majority of actual field labour even when land ownership and formal negotiations remain male-dominated, a pattern documented extensively in coverage of Maharashtra's cane-cutting migrant communities specifically.

This labour structure connects to the same cost pressures shaping the Fair and Remunerative Price and cane arrears discussions covered elsewhere on this site, cane-cutting labour cost is a genuine, if often invisible, component of the total cost mills and farmers jointly bear to get cane from field to mill, and the seasonal, seldom-unionised nature of this migrant workforce means labour cost and working condition concerns rarely get the same policy attention as the pricing and payment disputes between mills and land-owning farmers that dominate sugar industry news coverage.