NEW DELHI, Feb 18: The Indian government plans to open centres where people can abandon unwanted daughters in a bid to tackle the abortion of female foetuses and infanticide, a report said on Sunday.

“We want to put a cradle (creche) in every district. What we are saying to the people is: have your children, don't kill them,” Renuka Chowdhury, the federal minister for women and child development, told the Press Trust of India.

“We will bring up the children. But don't kill them because there really is a crisis situation,” she said.

Hundreds of thousands of unborn girls are killed each year in India, where families prize sons because of fiercely criticised social conventions. This has left the country with a severely imbalanced sex ratio.

Sons are typically seen as breadwinners. They are also needed to light their parents' funeral pyres according to the practice of Hinduism.

Girls are often viewed as a financial burden because of the matrimonial dowry demanded by a groom's family.

A study by The Lancet, a British medical journal, said last year that India may have lost 10 million unborn girls in the past 20 years, but Indian experts put the figure at around five million.

Under Indian law, tests to determine an unborn baby's gender are illegal unless conducted for medical reasons. But the practice continues in what activists say is a flourishing multi-million-dollar business.

India has 927 girls for every 1,000 boys under the age of six, as opposed to the worldwide average of 1,050 girls.

But activists said the government proposal was “absurd”. They said it would send the wrong message and fail to arrest abortions.

“Most of the girls are killed before birth, not after birth. So, where is the option of abandoning girls if they are not born at all,” said Sabu George, who has researched female foeticide for two decades.

George said some girls abandoned under a similar scheme in the southern state of Tamil Nadu in the 1990s died at poorly staffed and supplied government hospitals.—AFP