FEMALE FOETICIDE IS A DEEP CULTURAL PROBLEM IN OUR COUNTRY FOR WHICH SEVERAL POSITIVE REINFORCEMENTS ARE REQUIRED. THERE HAVE BEEN POSITIVE CHANGES. “BETI BACHAO BETI PADHAO” CAMPAIGN IS WORKING. GIRLS ARE BEGINNING TO BE VALUED
Eligible Jat boys from Haryana travel 3,000 km across the country to find themselves a bride. With increasingly fewer girls in Haryana, they are seeking brides from as far away as Kerala as the only way to change their single status.
The girls have not vanished overnight. Decades of sex determination tests and female foeticide that has acquired genocide proportions are finally catching up with states in India.
This is only the tip of the demographic and social problems confronting India in the coming years. Skewed sex ratios have moved beyond the states of Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh. With news of increasing number of female foetuses being aborted from Orissa to Bangalore there is ample evidence to suggest that the next census will reveal a further fall in child sex ratios throughout the country.
The decline in child sex ratio in India is evident by comparing the census figures. In 1991, the figure was 947 girls to 1000 boys. Ten years later it had fallen to 927 girls for 1000 boys.
Since 1991, 80 per cent of districts in India have recorded a declining sex ratio with the state of Punjab being the worst.
States like Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana have recorded a more than 50 point decline in the child sex ratio in this period.
Despite these horrific numbers, foetal sex determination and sex selective abortion by unethical medical professionals has today grown into a Rs. 1,000 crore industry (US$ 244 million). Social discrimination against women, already entrenched in Indian society, has been spurred on by technological developments that today allow mobile sex selection clinics to drive into almost any village or neighbourhood unchecked.
The Union Minister of Women and Child Development Maneka Gandhi’s views that to ensure more girls are born in the country, every pregnant woman should undergo ultrasonography to determine the sex of the foetus and be monitored until the baby is born, is counterproductive.
We feel that the knowledge regarding the sex of the foetus being female by the family members, who are son-oriented, will result in pressurising the women, who hardly have any decision-making power, to undergo backstreet illegal and unsafe abortions. This will further increase the already high maternal mortality and morbidity due to unsafe abortions. It is a far-fetched notion that we have a mechanism in place for tracking each pregnant woman until delivery, even with the involvement of Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and considerable incentives to all concerned. Even though there is an improvement, we still have not achieved universal institutional deliveries, as century-old practices cannot be wiped out overnight.
How would pregnant women be taken to ultrasound clinics? Who will bear the burden of additional cost of the test, travel, incidentals, compensation for loss of work and so on, especially for women from low socio-economic backgrounds? And most important, would this not mean policing of the women? Is the minister suggesting we scrap the PC PNDT Act 1994, wherein sex determination of an unborn foetus in-utero is illegal? Why not modify the Act to take away the harassment of the medical fraternity?
Female foeticide is a deep cultural problem in our country for which several positive reinforcements are required. There have been positive changes. “Beti bachao beti padhao” campaign is working. Girls are beginning to be valued. Our girls, by positive contribution, will prove they are not only equal, but better than the boys. Let us not regress in our policies.
The author is president of Parivar Seva Sanstha (PSS), a national-level NGO actively working on reproductive health issues, including safe and legal abortions since 1978.