Women working in sugar cane fields are still being “pushed” to undergo surgery to remove their womb and enable them to work longer hours without period pain, activists in India’s state of Maharashtra have said.
Large numbers of women undertake long hours of manual work harvesting, gathering, lifting and loading large stacks of cane to trucks and tractors. A combination of poverty, low pay of less than £4 a day, and the threat of fines for missing or incomplete work days, was putting pressure on women to agree to hysterectomies, despite promises of reform, said labour rights’ campaigners.
