Think Your Job Is Tough? Women In Central Maharashtra Are Giving Up Their Uteruses For A Few Days Pay

Think Your Job Is Tough? Women In Central Maharashtra Are Giving Up Their Uteruses For A Few Days Pay

The fact of the matter is, every working woman makes certain sacrifices. It’s either in the form of not being able to give as much time to their family as they would like to or something as simple as not getting as much sleep as they would need. Making sacrifices is part and parcel of having a job, whether it is in a city or a rural area. Though, sometimes we tend to forget how easy we have it living and working in metropolitan cities. Until now, I for one, haven’t ever thought about how people in rural areas survive without all the luxuries we take for granted.

Regardless of the location, we all work to make ends meet. The only difference is in working conditions. While we sit for ten hours a day in centrally air conditioned offices, get a certain amount of paid leaves a year, get health and dental insurance and maternity leaves. Women in rural areas work round the clock under the harsh sun with not even a decent lunch break. They are paid less than minimum wages for eight times the work. The conditions they work under are truly gruesome and we know this because of what has just come to our attention about the women working in sugarcane fields in central Maharashtra.

Recently, Nitin Raut who is a Congress leader in Maharashtra wrote a letter to CM Udhav Thackeray urging him to intervene in the depraved conditions that these women in the Marathwada region work. In that letter, he informed the CM that almost 30,000 women have undergone hysterectomies (removal of the uterus) so that they can avoid losing wages on the days that they are menstruating. I was truly taken aback when I heard this. I did not expect women working on fields to get menstrual leaves, but this paints a terrifying picture of the circumstances they work under. The newly elected state government needs to do something about this and soon.

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In the letter the minister wrote, “A large of women labourers don’t work during their menstrual cycle and don’t get wages for the days they are absent and hence, they opt for removal of their uterus.” He further wrote, “Requesting you to issue orders to the department concerned to solve the problems faced by women sugarcane workers in Marathwada on humanitarian ground.”

According to Nitin Raut, if sugarcane factories provided the working women four days paid leave each month during the six-month sugarcane harvesting season, this issue can be tackled. There are also reports that show that these factories refuse to hire women who menstruate, so women from villages in the Beed district opt to get hysterectomies.

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Action needs to taken immediately and we need to get this conversation going. These women have made the ultimate sacrifice just so they don’t lose out on a few days pay. There is nothing right about this situation. Every woman in the world menstruates, this is discrimination to its optimum. It led 30,000 women into thinking the easier way out was to get surgery.

I understand the irony of sitting comfortably in an office and writing about these women who do the kind of work I wouldn’t even be able to do for a day. But, the least we can do to get them a little justice and make their work-life a little easier is to talk about it. Gather enough buzz around the topic that authorities will have to take some action.

 

https://thehauterfly.com/lifestyle/singer-anoushka-shankar-calls-india-no-country-for-women-and-sadly-enough-we-agree/

Mitali Shah

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