"Child Marriage and Hysterectomies: Uncovering India's Sugar Industry"
A New York Times and Fuller Project investigation has revealed that the sugar industry in Maharashtra, India, has been fueled by a brutal system of labor that exploits children and leads to the unnecessary sterilization of working-age women. Young girls are pushed into illegal child marriages to work in the sugar cane fields, where they are trapped in debt bondage and subjected to forced hysterectomies, even for routine ailments. This exploitative cycle perpetuates their financial entrapment and ensures their return to the fields, leading to lasting health consequences and defining such arrangements as forced labor by workers' rights groups and the United Nations labor agency.