In Beed, Drought Ends in the Operating Theatre

When the rains stopped coming to Beed, it wasn’t only the crops that failed. Women’s bodies began to fail first.

Beed, a drought-hit district in Maharashtra’s Marathwada region, has become known for something no place should ever be known for: an unusually high number of women without wombs. Not because of cancer. Not because of medical emergencies. It is because survival, under the cross-section of climate stress and labour exploitation, has made the uterus expendable.

For years, recurring droughts have devastated agriculture in Beed. Rainfall deficits, falling groundwater levels, crop failure and rising debt have pushed families to the edge. With few local employment options, entire households migrate seasonally to sugarcane-growing regions of western Maharashtra, Karnataka, Telangana, and Andhra Pradesh.

Sugarcane cutting is among the most physically punishing forms of agricultural labour. Workers routinely put in 12 to 18 hours a day. They cut, bundle, lift, and load cane weighing up to 40 kilograms. They wake before dawn and sleep after exhaustion takes over. Labourers are hired in husband-wife pairs, known as jodis, and controlled by contractors called mukadams. Wages are paid as advances for the season, binding families to months of uninterrupted labour (Phull, 2023).

There is no sick leave. No paid rest. No protection for menstruation, pregnancy, or illness. For women, this absence of protection becomes dangerous very quickly.

Missing a day of work due to period pain, infection, miscarriage, or pregnancy can mean fines higher than a day’s wage. Living conditions near the fields are harsh, consisting of makeshift tarpaulin huts with no toilets, limited access to water, and absolutely no privacy. After a full day of labour, women must still cook, fetch water, and care for children. Managing menstruation in these conditions often leads to infections and chronic reproductive health problems.

Consequently, menstruation is treated as inefficiency, and pregnancy as a liability. Women begin to internalise a brutal calculation: if the body interferes with work, the body must be altered.

Over the past decade, thousands of women from Beed, many under 40, have undergone hysterectomies. Investigations by government panels and reports by journalists and activists reveal that Beed’s hysterectomy rates range from 22% to 38%. By comparison, the national average is just 3% (Phull, 2023).

In a district with one government hospital and dozens of private clinics, regulation is weak, and accountability is weaker. Many women report being advised by private doctors to remove their wombs for vague reasons, such as "white discharge" or a uterus that has "gone bad." Contractors sometimes offer loans for the surgery, which are later deducted from wages. Families, struggling under debt and food insecurity, often support the decision. They tell her: We already have children, what use is a uterus now?

Nobody explains lifelong pain, hormonal collapse, depression, and heart disease. Nobody talks about what it means to hollow out a woman’s body so she can work harder.

This is what coerced consent looks like. When the alternatives are hunger, fines, debt bondage, or unemployment, calling this a “choice” is dishonest. Women are not choosing hysterectomies. They are choosing to survive within a system that punishes their biology.

Many women report chronic pain, early menopause, depression, cardiovascular problems, and declining strength after surgery. Rather than boosting productivity, hysterectomies often reduce women’s ability to work, worsening poverty and ill health. The women of Beed are not passive victims. They respond rationally to irrational systems.

Climate change is often spoken about in terms of melting glaciers and rising seas. But in Beed, climate change is intimate. It lives inside women. It alters their hormones, their bones, and their minds.

Environmental collapse does not affect everyone equally. When it meets informal labour systems and entrenched gender inequality, women’s bodies become shock absorbers for systemic failure. The cost of drought is quietly transferred from policy failures to flesh and bone.

This is why the Beed hysterectomies are not just a health issue. They are a climate justice issue, a labour rights issue, and a women’s rights issue. A society that allows women to lose organs to remain employable has already decided whose bodies are the most disposable.

Periods should not carry penalties. Pregnancy should not threaten livelihoods. Work should never demand the removal of a womb. If we continue to talk about climate change without talking about women like them, we are choosing comfort over truth, and women have paid enough for that silence already.

By Farheen Sultana

 

References:

Phull, R. K. (2023). Mass womb-icide: Why are Maharashtra’s female sugarcane labourers paying for expensive hysterectomies? 次世代論集, 6, 25–28. https://www.waseda.jp/inst/oris/assets/uploads/2023/07/jisedaironshu6note.pdf