Gratis Mind

Police in the eastern Indian state of Orissa have exhumed skulls and body parts believed to be from three dozen aborted female foetuses and murdered infant girls in an abandoned well, a grisly find that highlights the persistence of infanticide in the country. However, the authorities have yet to conclusively determine the sex of the bodies unearthed. But, your guess is as good as mine.

Television channels revealed that Nayagarh has one of the worst sex ratios in the state. It has a dozen private ultrasound clinics, only one of which is licensed.

Satish Agnihotri, a demographer who studied Orissa’s sex ratios, said that new technology and increasing prosperity had combined to worsen widen the gap between the number of boys and the number of girls being born. In the last census urban Orissa only had 860 girls per 1000 boys.

“This is a new phenomenon in Orissa which traditionally has been free of the girl child problem. But money and technology are having a big impact,” he said.

The incident is only the tip of the iceberg, said Sabu George, a prominent campaigner against female feticide. Mr George said that by 2011, Indian families will be killing 1 million female children a year.

Traditionally, India’s patriarchal society prefers boys over girls. Punjab and the neighbouring state of Haryana, the richest states in India, have seen sex ratios heavily skewed.

According to the 2001 census - the latest official population data - the national sex ratio was 933 girls to 1,000 boys. In Punjab it was 798 girls to 1,000 boys, compared with 875 in 1991.

The skewing of the populations in favour of males has meant that brides are scarce - men are forced to travel across the country to find a match.

Mr George said the problem could be traced to “doctors who kill. There is no other word for it. They take money and with the full knowledge of the parents they abort female foetuses. The question is whether the police will prosecute”.

I agree this is not something new in India or for people from India. But, if you look at the numbers below, it shows that its a significantly grave situation. A survey by The Lancet estimates that 10million female births may have been lost to abortion and sex selection in the past 20 years Thats quite a HUGE number

In most countries, women slightly outnumber men, but separate research for the year 2001 showed that for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were just 933 girls.

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They found that there was an increasing tendency to select boys when previous children had been girls. In cases where the preceding child was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys in the next birth was 759 to 1,000.
This fell even further when the two preceding children were both girls. Then the ratio for the third child born was just 719 girls to 1,000 boys. However, for a child following the birth of a male child, the gender ratio was roughly equal.

To quote from CSR, An institution for Women of India,

In UNICEF’s 2007 State of The World’s Children it was estimated that 7000 fewer girls than expected are born everyday in India . In August 2006 around 50 female foetuses were discovered in a well in Patiala , Punjab , the state with the lowest sex ratio in the country[2]. In the same month in Aligarh , Uttar Pradesh, a dozen embryo were found dumped in a pond[3]. These are just a couple of recent examples of an endemic social practice.

Fertility is declining more rapidly in urban and educated families than in rural areas, yet nevertheless the preference for male children in this group remains strong. For these families, modern medical technologies are within easy reach. Worryingly, the trend is actually increasing; the most recent Indian Government census showed that in India as a whole sex-selective abortion is becoming more common.

In 1991, the sex ratio of girls to boys (0-6 yrs) was 945:1000. Ten years on, the ratio stood at 927:1000.

Given the availability and reduced cost of scanning technology, sex selective abortion has become increasingly common in urban areas, and worryingly is now rapidly spreading to rural areas also.

In Delhi there are 868 girls for every 1000 boys. In Punjab , there are even fewer - only 798 girls for every 1000 boys[4], which means that there are only 4 girls for every 5 boys. As women undertake a broad range of paid and unpaid labour, the lives of those girl children who survive are negatively impacted upon by the problems which a shortage of women causes, including an increase in: workload; violence; likelihood of being unofficially bound to multiple men; sexual exploitation and polyandrous marriages.