Maharashtra’s drought is pushing sugarcane workers out of their villages earlier than usual, turning a seasonal labour movement into an immediate survival response. Families from Beed, Dhule and Nandurbar have begun leaving after their kharif crops failed, even though the agricultural season would normally still be underway. The state government has declared drought in 265 of Maharashtra’s 358 talukas across 32 districts.
The early migration is important because it shows how quickly a climate and farm-income shock can become a movement of people. Sugarcane workers usually leave after Dussehra, once they have harvested their own crops and exhausted local farm work. This year, families began leaving in August and September, weeks ahead of the normal cycle. With little or no income available in their villages, they have travelled to sugar factories in western Maharashtra, Karnataka and, in some cases, Tamil Nadu.
The change is not simply a matter of timing. It reflects the collapse of the sequence that normally allows small farmers and agricultural labourers to remain in their villages for part of the year. A household may combine earnings from its own farm, work on another farmer’s land and then seasonal employment at a sugar factory. When the kharif crop fails and local agricultural work disappears, the household loses the first two sources at once. Migration then becomes the earliest available route to cash, even when the work is difficult and the destination is far from home.
In Beed, where rainfall remained absent for much of August and September, families with small landholdings began leaving after recognising that little work would be available on other farms. Jyoti Thorat, a resident of Kathoda, said six members of her family left for Tamil Nadu by the end of August after a labour contractor, or mukadam, told them work was available at sugar factories there. The family’s two-acre bajra crop had failed. An advance from the contractor was used to buy bajra from the market, groceries, medicines and clothes, creating debt before the migration had even begun.
The family is expected to remain at the sugar factory until March. Thorat said the migrants had told relatives that the weather was harsh and that they were facing difficulties. Their experience illustrates the distance between migration as an employment arrangement and migration as a distress measure. A job may provide immediate money, but the need to borrow in advance can also tie workers to a season-long contract and reduce their ability to negotiate working conditions.
The system is organised around the mukadam, who arranges advances, travel and employment at sugar factories. At the factories, workers typically spend seven to eight hours cutting sugarcane and several more hours loading it on to trucks. Under the koyta system, a couple is treated as one work unit and is paid around Rs 366 per tonne of sugarcane cut. In Dhule, a mukadam said about 60-70 people left from Pangan village for Baramati in the first week of September. According to him, some workers had taken advance loans and would work at factories until Holi before returning home. Depending on the loan taken, most were paid around Rs 70,000 as a total amount or according to the tonnes they cut and loaded.
These arrangements provide a functioning labour supply for the sugar industry, but they also expose the dependence of rural households on informal intermediaries. The advance is valuable when food, medicines and basic consumption needs cannot wait for a future harvest. At the same time, the advance links repayment to physically demanding work at a distant factory. The earlier the migration begins, the more it reflects the absence of alternatives in the home village rather than a planned seasonal choice.
The scale of the drought adds to the significance of the movement. The government’s declaration covers 265 talukas in 32 districts, while the reported early departures are concentrated in drought-affected areas of Marathwada and northern Maharashtra. The available account does not establish the full number of workers who have migrated this year. It does, however, show a pattern in which families dependent on small farms and agricultural labour are leaving before the normal cane-cutting period because the local farm economy has failed.
The migration also revives an institutional problem that has already reached the courts. In 2023, the Bombay High Court took suo motu cognisance of a report on the condition of sugarcane workers and recorded that 10 to 12 lakh workers migrate from drought-prone areas, including Marathwada, for sugarcane work. The court noted concerns about drinking water, sanitation and other basic facilities, as well as the risk of bonded labour.
When the matter was last heard in March 2025, the state had agreed to suggestions made by amicus curiae Mihir Desai, based on a report by advocates Devyani Kulkarni and Rishika Agarwal. The suggestions included better housing, regular health check-ups, creches for infants and the continuation of education for children accompanying their parents. These measures recognise that sugarcane migration is not only a labour issue. It creates a temporary settlement system involving housing, water, sanitation, healthcare, childcare, education and transport.
The workplace and the settlement are closely connected. A worker who spends the cutting season at a factory cannot access basic services merely through a wage rate. Families need safe accommodation, drinking water and sanitation where they live during the season. Children need schooling or other arrangements for continuing education. Infants require care, and workers need health services in locations that may be far from their villages. Without these facilities, the labour arrangement shifts the cost of production and social reproduction almost entirely on to the workers.
Jivan Rathod, who filed an intervention plea in the court case, said most recommendations had not been implemented by sugar factories and that compliance was not being adequately verified by state authorities. He said housing, clean water and sanitation were still not being provided consistently, while the drought had placed migrants under acute financial distress. His account is a reported criticism of implementation, but it points to a central governance question: whether agreed protections are being measured and enforced at the places where workers actually live and work.
Registration is another part of that question. One recommendation in the court case was the registration of workers migrating for employment. Yet district authorities in Marathwada said they had received no reports of migration so far. This creates a gap between people’s movement and the administrative systems intended to identify and support them. If workers leave through informal channels and are not registered, authorities may not have a reliable picture of their numbers, destinations, employment terms or access to basic facilities.
The absence of registration also complicates the state’s ability to plan. A drought response is often assessed through rainfall, crop loss and relief measures in the affected village. But the impact continues after households leave. Migrants need protection at sugar factories and other worksites, while their families and communities need support in their home districts. A response that counts only the village of origin can miss the temporary settlements where the consequences of drought become visible.
Officials said employment would be made available to people facing distress through the Viksit Bharat–Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission (Gramin), or VB–G RAM G. Farmers and labourers, however, said work under the scheme had not been forthcoming even as the rains failed. That difference between an announced employment channel and work available on the ground is central to understanding why families accept difficult migration conditions.
Manisha Tokle of the Mahila Ustod Sanghtana said sugar factory work was backbreaking, with women carrying 30-40 kilograms of cut sugarcane on their heads to load and unload trucks. She argued that people would not choose to remain away from home in such conditions if work guaranteeing minimum wages were available locally. Her assessment links three issues that are often treated separately: the adequacy of rural employment, the bargaining power of migrant workers and the enforcement of workplace protections.
The timing of migration affects that bargaining power. A household leaving after its crop has failed has fewer options and less money to wait for better terms. The advance from a mukadam may solve an immediate food or medical need, but it can also make the worker dependent on the contractor and the factory for the rest of the season. When local employment is unavailable, the formal choice to migrate may conceal a much narrower economic choice.
The drought therefore exposes a wider weakness in the rural-urban and inter-regional labour system. Sugar factories depend on a mobile workforce, while drought-prone households depend on factory employment when agriculture fails. But the institutions governing this movement remain divided among district administrations, employment programmes, labour intermediaries, sugar factories and the authorities responsible for health, sanitation and education. The reported lack of migration records and weak verification of agreed facilities suggests that no single system is currently capturing the full chain.
The evidence supplied in the report does not establish how many workers have left early across the state, whether all declared drought talukas are experiencing similar migration, or how many factories are complying with the court-linked recommendations. Those gaps matter. They determine whether the early departures are an isolated acceleration in a few districts or an indication of a broader shift in the seasonal labour calendar.
What is established is that crop failure has already changed household decisions in parts of Maharashtra. Families have left before the usual cane-cutting season, borrowed to meet basic needs, and travelled farther than usual for work. The state has declared drought across a large number of talukas, while local workers report that promised employment has not been readily available. The next test for the administration is whether it can record this movement, provide viable work before distress migration occurs and ensure that workers who do migrate receive the housing, water, sanitation, health, childcare and education protections already identified in the court process.
