David Goldman

Photographer
     
Migrant Sugarcane Workers Of India
Location: Santa Monica, California
Nationality: Canadian
Biography: Watching, listening and learning from the people that I photograph. The moment shared is often an intimate and vulnerable one. Ensuring that the humanity and dignity of the subject are always maintained is paramount to me. Although not too old, I... MORE
Public Story
Migrant Sugarcane Workers Of India
Copyright David Goldman 2024
Updated May 2020
Location Mudhol, India
Topics Agriculture, Children, Civil Rights, Community, Corruption, Discrimination, Documentary, Education, Film, Human Rights, Migration, Multimedia, Photography, Photojournalism, Poverty, Short Film, Workers' Rights
This project is broken down into 5 sections + a main video. Becuase of the format of Visura the project just goes as one long essay broken up with small intro videos for each section. The full project as it was intended to be seen can be viewed here

Summary

Each year as the monsoons in India die down a migration of up to half a million people (men, women and children) will travel from the states of Maharashtra to Karnataka in search of work in the sugarcane fields. Working in the fields for up to six months children are removed from local schools in order to work side by side with parents and grandparents. Since the children are not able to stay in school in their local villages they are forced to abandon their education and forgo a more stable job in the future. Although parents desperately want to educate their children they simply do not have enough money to do it. Meanwhile children of factory workers are enrolled in high quality schools guaranteeing them a more stable future.

First-person

A few years ago I spent a month in India and Bangladesh working for The United Nations Trust Fund To End Violence Against Women. While shooting for that project I was first introduced to the migrant sugarcane workers. They were living in a tent city in the shadow of a sugarcane-processing factory. I wanted to know more about them so I spent time photographing some families. Later I learned from my UN hosts that the migrant families travel multiple days by ox cart to get to the farms and factories in order to cut and harvest cane. I was fascinated by this and eventually I created an Indiegogo campaign to raise money for a project I was calling "The Commoditization of Migrant Sugarcane Workers. My goal was to show how the migrants are to a certain extent commoditized and marginalized. My intention was to show how a paradox exists in that they desperately want to educate their children but almost by design face an inability to attain it. This lack of access to education is a symptom of a bigger problem that faces not only emerging countries like India but developed ones as well.

I set about shooting stills and video while simultaneously collecting audio and GPS coordinates to create more of what I was calling a 360 degree experience via a website, book and an augmented reality for the viewer. There are amazing new technologies that have been created but very few are being leveraged to tell stories in a more dynamic way than have been done in the past. The current website (see link above) displays video, stills, copy as well as access to a published book that can be viewed and downloaded. When viewing this book in it's printed format the viewer can via an app access the videos that are normally only available online.





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Migrant Sugarcane Workers Of India by David Goldman
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