Daughters not wanted — in India
LONDON: Bhavia is sleeping swaddled in a woolly peach cardigan amid the wailing and flailing limbs of 20 other babies. Nurses in lilac saris and face masks scoop the bundles from rockers and jig them under the wintry Delhi sun. Two days ago, the baby girl became the newest arrival at Palna, an orphanage in the capital’s Civil Lines district. But Bhavia is not an orphan. She is what used to be known as “a foundling”, abandoned by her mother in a local hospital.
When Bhavia came to Palna she was nameless, with no date of birth. What is certain, from a cursory glance at the line of babies, is that an orphanage is one of the few places in India where males are outnumbered. For every boy lying in the sunny courtyard, there are four girls. Some have been dumped outside police stations, some in railway toilets, crowded fairgrounds, or the dark corners of bus stations. Others were left outside the orphanage in a wicker cradle, in a specially built alcove by a busy road. The weight of a child here will set off an alarm, alerting Palna’s staff to a new arrival.
Almost always, it is girls who are left in the cradle. Healthy boys are only deserted in India if born to single mothers; boys left by a married couple are the disabled ones. Not all abandoned girls come from families too poor to feed them, however. Some have been found with a neatly packed bag containing a change of clothes, milk formula and disposable nappies.
Girls such as Bhavia are survivors in an India where it has never been more dangerous to be conceived female. A preference for boys, who carry on the family bloodline and inherit wealth, has always existed in Indian society. But what has made being a girl so risky now, is the lethal cocktail of new money mixed with medical technology that makes it possible to tell the sex of a baby while it is still in the womb.
Although gender-based abortion is illegal, parents are choosing to abort female foetuses in such large numbers that experts estimate India has lost ten million girls in the past two decades. In the 12 years since selective abortion was outlawed, only one doctor has been convicted of carrying out the crime.
This hidden tragedy surfaces not only in the statistics of skewed sex ratios, but also in the back yards of clinics that hoped to bury the evidence. Earlier this month police arrested two people after the discovery of 400 pieces of bones believed to be of female foetuses in the town of Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh. Last September, the remains of dozens of babies were exhumed from a pit outside an abortion clinic in Punjab. According to investigators, that clinic was run by an untrained, unqualified retired soldier and his wife. To dispose of the evidence, acid was use to melt the flesh and then the bones were hammered to smithereens.
Last year, in a series of reports entitled Kokh Me Katl, or Murder in the Womb, two journalists working for India’s Sahara Samay television channel found 100 doctors, in both private and government hospitals, who were prepared to perform illegal terminations of girl foetuses. In the grainy TV pictures, doctors from four states and 36 cities talked with chilling casualness about how to dump the remains. Many weren’t bothered about the foetus’s age, just that it was a girl that could be got rid off. The average cost of the procedure was a few thousand rupees.
In Agra, one doctor told the reporters to get rid of the dead foetus in the Yamuna river, which curves past the Taj Mahal. “That is not a problem. Take a rickshaw and throw it in the river,” he said. In Dholpur, a town in Rajasthan, a female medic said the fields were pitted with the unmarked graves of unborn girls. She told the undercover couple that if their foetus was too big to easily be disposed of, they should pay a street sweeper to get rid of the body.
The latest estimate of India’s sex ratio at birth (SRB) can be gleamed from a sample registration system that covers 1.3m households. For the two years up to 2004, India had just 882 girls per 1,000 boys. Only China is worse. Beijing’s harsh, yet effective, family-planning policy limited urban couples to a single child which was usually a boy. China’s sex ratio stands at just 832:1,000. Sabu George, a Delhi-based researcher who has worked for two decades on female foeticide, describes the first few months in the womb as “the riskiest part of a woman’s life cycle in India”. The sex ratios in the country, he says, are getting worse “day by day”. India, he says, now has 930,000 missing girls every year. “What we are talking about is a massive, hidden number of deaths.”
Although ministers in India have woken up to “a national crisis”, the response has been to condone the abandonment of female babies. “lf you don’t want a girl, leave her to us,” Renuka Chowdhury, India’s minister of state for women and child development, said recently. The government “will bring up your children. Don’t kill them”. The announcement was a desperate response to stem India’s dramatic deficit of women. In the west, women outnumber men by at least three per cent. India has almost eight per cent more men than women. The question for India is what sort of future it faces without enough women. One dystopian answer, given by academics Valerie M Hudson and Andrea den Boer, is that a generation of men unable to find wives has already emerged. In their book, Bare Branches, they write of men who will never marry and have children. It is these men, they say, who are already largely responsible for social unrest in those areas where women are in short supply.
Indians, therefore, have come to view the girl child as a burden, an investment without return. A favourite Hindi saying translates as: “Having a girl is to plant a seed in someone else’s garden.”—Dawn/The Guardian News Service