Climate migrants in rural India have hysterectomies to survive, report says

NEW DELHI — Drought is driving poor Indian women into exploitative sugar cane work in the central state of Maharashtra, with many of the migrant labourers opting to undergo unnecessary hysterectomies to work even harder, research showed on Feb 7.

Years of failed monsoons, extreme heat and droughts have led residents of Beed, a district in the top sugar-producing state to leave and become day labourers on plantations, said the report by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a London-based think-tank.

The research found more than half of the Beed women who had gone to work on sugar plantations had undergone surgery to remove their uteruses compared with less than a fifth from households that had stayed in the district.

"Contractors cutting one- or two-days wage for missing work causes women to feel they have no choice but to have their wombs removed so their periods or pregnancy don't prevent them from working," said Ritu Bharadwaj, a principal researcher with the IIED and the paper's lead author.

"Hysterectomies are a symptom of economic distress in the region that is exacerbated by the climate crisis," she added, saying the findings underscored the far-reaching — and hard to quantify — loss and damage caused by climate change.

Rising heat and extreme weather fuelled by climate change are battering subsistence farmers in India and elsewhere, leading to more frequent crop failures that drive people to migrate.

Global temperatures have risen more than 1.2 deg C since pre-industrial times and are now approaching a 1.5 deg C of warming mark that scientists fear could herald a transition to costlier and deadlier climate change impacts.

Health risks

During the 30 years to 2011, Beed experienced a