The logic behind India’s labor systems that penalize menstruating women is similar to that of witch hunts

At the end of 2024, a health report from Beed district in Maharashtra revealed this 843 women had undergone a hysterectomy just before the annual sugarcane migration season. More than half of them were between thirty and thirty-five years old. These women were not sick. However, because they complained of cramps, irregular periods and routine gynecological problems, doctors described their uterus as diseased and recommended its removal. The women paid between 10,000 and 30,000 rupees for the operation, often using their wages for the coming season to finance it. Within a few weeks they returned to the sugar cane fields and were allowed to work twelve to eighteen hour shifts without menstruating.

These numbers are not new. In 2019, the Maharashtra Health Minister stated in the state assembly that private hospitals had been performing well 4,605 ​​hysterectomies in Beed over a period of three years. This was the result of a study commissioned by the Maharashtra State Commission for Women last year 36 percent of sugarcane workers in the state had undergone hysterectomy. The Neelam Gorhe Committee was set up to investigate this and make recommendations. However, the labor system that caused the crisis remained unchanged.

A 29-year-old sugarcane cutter from Beed shows off her hysterectomy scar. Image source: Chloé Sharrock/MYOP

Most reports on Beed discuss these high hysterectomy rates as either a reproductive health crisis or a case of medical exploitation by unqualified doctors. Both are true, but they only capture part of the problem. They focus on the procedure and the clinic, while the real problem lies in the contract.

The contract that disciplines the body

Sugarcane harvesting in western Maharashtra is done according to the Mukadam system. The workers are hired in Koyta pairs, that is, the spouses are employed together. This hiring is done through a contractor called Mukadam. Before the season begins, each couple receives an advance payment called uchal, usually between fifty thousand and one lakh rupees. This advance is a debt that can only be repaid through work in the fields.

Once the harvest season begins in October, workers must work non-stop until March or April. There are penalties for days without work. The penalty known as Khada is deducted from wages. In this system, menstruation and pregnancy are treated in the same way as illness and injury, as they all interrupt work equally. In the sugarcane fields of Maharashtra, a period means a loss of productivity. The Mukadam doesn’t care why a woman can’t stand in the field for sixteen hours. All he cares about is that she isn’t standing. The uchal she owes doesn’t stop because she’s bleeding.

In the sugarcane fields of Maharashtra, a period means a loss of productivity. The Mukadam doesn’t care why a woman can’t stand in the field for sixteen hours. All he cares about is that she isn’t standing. The uchal she owes doesn’t stop because she’s bleeding.

When a doctor at a private clinic tells a staff member in her 20s that her menstrual pain requires a hysterectomy, that suggestion seems entirely practical in the context of the specialty. By removing the organ that causes absenteeism, the wage penalty is eliminated and the woman can go back to work. This logic works perfectly, from the Mukadam’s ledger to the surgeon’s table. The woman who leaves this clinic will never again lose a day’s wages because of her period. However, she now has to deal with early menopause, loss of bone density, hormonal imbalances and chronic pain.

Sugarcane workers in Maharashtra. Image source: Saumya Khandelwal/The New York Times

In their Economic and Political Weekly 2019 article: Harvesting the uterusAbhay Shukla and Seema Kulkarni described this dynamic as a “convergence of oppression.” However, when viewed from the perspective of the body, the term “convergence” falls short. This is because there is a collision of different problems. The system works exactly as intended. By punishing the menstruating body through the contract and removing the menstruating organ through the clinic, the field ultimately secures a worker who does not bleed so that productivity can continue without interruption. So the “harvest” is not just about sugar cane, but also about the biological future of the women who harvest it.

What Mahasweta Devi already knew

Long before this logic was formalized in health policy or labor economics, author Mahasweta Devi had already identified it. In “Dain,” the final chapter of her book Gehrati Ghatayen, a tribal woman is labeled a witch by her community for no other reason than the fact that her physical presence, fertility, and autonomy disrupt male-established property relations.

The Ojha who brands them acts as an economic actor rather than a naive creditor. By using faith to exert control, he channels the community’s fear into judgment about women’s bodies. Unrelated and often killed, she rarely survives a judgment that essentially punishes her body for not behaving.

Representative image. Photo credit: Himanshu Vyas/Hindustan Times

Mahasweta Devi mapped this exact form of extraction decades ago in Stanadayini (translated as Breast Donor). In the story of Jashoda, Devi explores an economy that keeps a woman alive just to harvest her breast milk for a wealthy family. But as soon as she is diagnosed with cancer, she is abandoned. Devi noticed how the job market reduces the female body to its most profitable parts. The private clinics in Beed follow the same logic with the uterus and remove it as soon as its natural cycle could affect a contractor’s profits.

The shortcomingS during menstrual activitiesM

This situation reveals a significant divide in mainstream feminism in India. Over the last decade, much of the focus has been on period poverty and the cultural stigma surrounding menstruation. We work tirelessly to ensure that women have the right to stay in kitchens and temples during their menstruation. But giving a sanitary napkin to a sugarcane worker whose contract imposes a fine on her for menstruation does not solve the problem.

The thousands of women undergoing hysterectomies in Maharashtra face the crushing burden of the Khada penalty. Due to their enormous Uchal debts, they are tied to continuous physical labor, so any biological break becomes a direct threat to their survival. You can’t advocate for education and change a system that punishes the uterus. The Mukadam has a financial reason to employ a surgically optimized workforce. This shows what happens when an unregulated economy treats human biology as a burden that reduces profits.

From the village clearing to the hospital table

In Caliban and the WitchSilvia Federici argues that the European witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries were a collective attack on women’s reproductive rights at a time when emerging capitalism needed a reliable workforce. Disciplining the female body into a labor production machine was sought by targeting midwives and women with knowledge of fertility.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici argues that the European witch hunts of the 16th and 17th centuries were a collective attack on women’s reproductive rights at a time when emerging capitalism needed a reliable workforce.

We need not look for an exact historical parallel to see how a similar arrangement works in modern India. According to the NCRB 74 people were murdered because of Witch hunt in 2023, with Jharkhand witnessing a hundred percent increase over the previous year. While the women killed or expelled from their communities as “dains” in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh are clearly not the same people who lost their uteruses in Beed, the systems affecting both groups are not very different.

In villages, an ojha might diagnose a woman’s body as a threat to the community and order disposal through banishment, branding, or death. In Maharashtra’s private clinics, a surgeon diagnoses a woman’s uterus as threatening her productivity and orders its surgical removal. Both characters function as intermediaries who benefit financially or socially from their judgments about women’s bodies, and both operate under the tacit approval of a state that refuses to intervene decisively. The Witch Hunt Prevention Act, 2016has been stagnating since 2016, similar to that Guidelines for Performing Hysterectomies The bans issued following the Neelam Gorhe Committee remain completely unenforced.

In villages, an ojha might diagnose a woman’s body as a threat to the community and order disposal through banishment, branding, or death. In Maharashtra’s private clinics, a surgeon diagnoses a woman’s uterus as threatening her productivity and orders its surgical removal.

Even though today the scalpel has replaced the funeral pyre, the basic logic has not changed. When a woman’s body bleeds, ages, or resists in a way that disrupts the economy, it is quickly flagged for correction. Regardless of whether such correction takes a ritual or surgical form, the ultimate goal is always to create a body that does not compromise profits.

Devi understood this dynamic long before Beed made headlines, just as Federici was documenting her roots in four centuries of European history. The mass hysterectomies in Maharashtra confirm that the battle over women’s bodies is anything but a settled historical event. It is an active, modernizing enterprise carried out organ by organ in private rural clinics to ensure that the sugarcane harvest is not interrupted by biology.

Roshan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Political Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His doctoral thesis examines witch hunting as a form of gender-based violence in West Bengal. Research interests include gender-based violence, ritual economics, caste-gender intersectionality and legal impunity. As a recipient of the 2025 National Youth Icon Award in the field of theater and performance, he has been working on performance as a site of political and cultural research for over a decade.