Article Source : www.outlookindia.com

Author : Saumya Roy

Date of Issue : May 8 2006

Title of Article : Meet the Parents

Details :

It's the same old story, only with a few new twists. Santosh Shinde, 14, son of landless labourers who take an Rs 8,000 loan to educate him. Now the moneylender wants the loan repaid, so the cash-strapped Shindes take a salary advance from the only man offering jobs around town, a sugarcane factory contractor. The advance is for two couples (a couple is a unit of work here) to cut cane for a season at a Karnataka factory. Problem is, they are just a husband, a wife and a gawky boy. So the Shindes hurriedly find a bride for Santosh: another 14-year-old, Pushpa, who accompanies them from their village in Maharashtra's Osmanabad district to Karnataka. They stop en route for a no-frills marriage at a temple.

Such teenage marriages are getting increasingly common in the drought-prone districts of Beed and Osmanabad, where nearly 1,00,000 people work as migrant sugarcane labourers in western Maharashtra's sugar factories.

There's even a name for it, 'gatekin'. It probably comes from the makeshift camps these migrant labourers set up outside the factory gates in the cane-cutting season. Contractors prefer married couples to single boys as they are more likely to stay on at the factories for months

Gatekin marriages usually follow the Shinde route, labourers taking a desperate advance from the contractor and arranging a quick-fix wedding. It's mostly between a boy whose parents need money and a girl whose parents feel insecure about taking their mature daughter along for the cutting season. Outlook attended one such wedding—it was over in under ten minutes, had little finery, and took place while a truck waited to take the newly married couple away to Baramati's Someshwar sugar factory. It was fixed four days before the ceremony, and a day after the groom's family made a deal with the contractor - to provide two couples to cut sugarcane."We had never seen anything like this even 2-3 years ago," says Ajay Dandekar, professor of development, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Gandhinagar, Gujarat. "It's the acute lack of rural employment which has led to such a situation."

With western Maharashtra's cane factories—which once produced nearly a third of India's sugar output—in a state of crisis, jobs for migrant labourers have dried up. Some estimates say the factories have accumulated losses of over Rs 1,900 crore, and this year 120 of the 177 sugar factories were forced to avail the Centre's Rs 1,650-crore bailout package. But the trickle-down has been harsher on the migrant labour, out in the fields cutting cane feverishly during the six-month-long season. Their chances of landing jobs have become harder, and wages have plummeted.

Thus the desperation that has birthed underage marriages, an old tradition in the region but one that had been clamped down on over the years. "The rise in such alliances has coincided with the decline of the sugar industry," says Sumita Kulkarni of Child Rights and You (CRY).

The pressure on the children is huge. Consider Shivaji Kale, an awkward, newly married sixteen-year-old. He had to rush home from his first cane-cutting season to take his Xth Board exams. Kale, still baby-faced, was working in a cane factory in Karnataka to help repay advances his parents had taken over the years.

Gangly Santosh, now 16 and sporting a straggly moustache, has just finished his Xth exams while wife Pushpa took her XIIth exams. Pushpa, a good student, balances her academic ambitions with caring for a one-and-a-half-year-old son. Then there's home and labour in the fields. As she says, "My marriage was so quick, I wonder sometimes—when did I get married...when did all this happen?" Asked if her health has suffered, the young mother says: "I try not to think about things I can't control. Instead I focus on what I can do now." Her in-laws have said she can study further only if she gets a scholarship. Otherwise, the young couple will migrate to Mumbai to work at a construction site.

While Pushpa's eyes light up when she talks of dreams of becoming a teacher one day, Shivaji Kale's wife, Soni, sits wordlessly in her magenta sari, green bangles and red bindi, staring blankly at her husband and mother, looking for help when asked a question. Soni is just 14. She was just 13 when she became one half of a working, earning couple.

Her parents, though, are looking at the positive side: "If we had done it here in the village, we would have had to feed the whole village and buy gifts," says Soni's mother, who has three more daughters to look out for. She also points out that getting Soni married eased the worry of having a young girl on the site, even made it easier for Shivaji to get work.

The village landscape is dotted with wagons full of people returning from a curtailed cane-cutting season to join the ranks of the unemployed. Wagons loaded with the motley assortment of all the things that make up these labourers' lives, from goats to pots tied together with clothes, remnants of crushed sugarcane, and babies born in huts outside factory gates, to frightened young teenage mothers. With the season cut short, a bleak future awaits. Most workers have not been able to earn enough to pay off the meagre advances they took from the contractors. And they know there is no work back home.

At one time, the sugar behemoths seemed to have jobs for everyone. Now they are lumbering, shuttered hulks dotting the western Maharashtra landscape, victims of political scrapping, overcapacity and mismanagement. Sugarcane takes up just four per cent of Maharashtra's cultivable land, but gets nearly 70 per cent of its irrigated water. Till a few years ago, 10-12 new sugar factories got sanctioned each year although there was not enough cane to feed them.

This season, more than a dozen factories took loans to start crushing cane. In Beed, the Tuljabhavani sugar factory operated only for two months, instead of the usual five. "The workers had taken advances, and didn't get enough work... they were begging for money to go back home," says Ram Rathod, a professor at the Tata Institute of Social Science campus in Osmanabad's Tuljapur district.

In a region ravaged by drought and joblessness, it isn't hard to understand why these hurriedly performed teen unions have gained acceptance. The only ones feeling the crunch, it seems, are the people in the wedding business. Hanuman Shinde, who owns a wedding band, says he often has only one assignment a month. Earlier, he would be booked for 10-15 days during the wedding season. Cooks, bangle sellers and cloth shop owners, they are also losing business too. Nowadays, those kind of weddings just don't happen anymore.