Article Source: Tribune

Date of Issue: September 26, 2007

Author: Megha Mann

Title of the article: Stop murdering the girl child

Punjab loses every fourth girl. By the 2011 census, we would be killing off 10 lakh girls a year. Though Indian society has earlier witnessed female infanticide, the new non-invasive ultrasound technology 'saved' people from committing the sin of killing their daughters. They started killing them in the womb itself. An ultimate manifestation of discrimination, it didn't even affect the conscience because there was no evidence.

As Sheela Bhatt, the managing director of rediff.com, described at a recent workshop held by Population Foundation of India in Gurgaon: "As a child born and brought up in Gujarat, I remember seeing paintings depicting the doodh-peeti (drinking milk) custom prevalent in our society. Under this custom, a female infant was killed by immersing her in an earthen ware vessel full of milk and her body was buried in the backyard of the house."

Not only Gujarat, but Punjab too has seen such crimes - though not in the form of a custom. People in many areas in Punjab are known to have killed their female infants by strangulating them with a sack of sand

"It would not be wrong to say that Amritsar came up as the epicentre of all these (sex-determination) activities, around two decades before the 2001 census came out with the grotesque figures," says Dr Sabu George from the Centre for Women Development Studies, New Delhi.

Amniocentesis first started in India in 1974 as a part of a sample survey conducted at the All India Institute of Medial Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, to detect foetal abnormalities. The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) later stopped the tests, but their value had leaked out by then and 1979 saw the first sex determination clinic opening in Amritsar. One 'enterprising' doctor set up the first private amniocentesis technique centre.

"Further, setting up of the department of genetics at Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar, only added fuel to fire. Many of the graduates from the early batches claimed roaring practices and some people in the department at that time went on record saying that they were contributing greatly towards Punjab's economy by not letting the girl child take birth," exclaims Dr Puneet Bedi, a leading gynaecologist at Delhi, who has been working on this issue for the past decade.

Experts say that 20 per cent of ultrasound tests conducted are done to determine the sex of the foetus. India has become the favorite ultrasound machine dumping area for companies form China, US and Germany.

Far from being found only amongst the poor and illiterate, sex selection is most prevalent in regions that boast high levels of educational attainment and relative prosperity, like Punjab. Interestingly, while well-educated and economically sound and upper-caste families prefer undergoing the test for want of a son, the scheduled castes in Punjab are God fearing and tend to avoid such things.

As researchers from the Centre for Research in Rural and Industrial Development (CRRID), Chandigarh, Monica Munjial and Poonam Kaushik point out, "We came across a number of SC couples who wanted to adopt family planning methods but at the same time did not have the courage to be involved in female foeticide." Both came across these findings during their study on growing awareness and increasing acceptance of family planning among scheduled castes in Punjab.

Though the Punjab government has gone a step ahead by taking erring people from the medical fraternity to task, little is being done to curb this thriving industry. Though Punjab surely has marched ahead of other states by prosecuting the erring doctors, yet it has failed on certain flimsy grounds and much needs to be done.

Terming the Punjab government's initiative to honor panchayats showing significant improvement in child sex-ratio of concerned village as a farce, Dr Sabu adds: "Scientifically speaking, to ascertain the improvement in child sex-ratio, we have to take into account 25,000 live births. A village is too small a level to be honored for this thing. Punjab as well as Himachal Pradesh government are doing this and may in fact set up wrong examples."

Even the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) III conducted from December 2005 to March 2006 has pointed to a strong son preference as an area of concern. Though the sex-ratio findings of NFHS III are yet to be announced, workers claimed to have come across large disparities in the sex-ratio.

"So strong is the son-fixation in Punjab, women and their relatives avoid going in for institutional deliveries, especially in government health centres. They fear that if they have a male child, he might get swapped with a female! And this is one of the major factors behind just 50 percent institutional deliveries in Punjab," says Dr Manisha Bhatia, research scholar with the Population Research Centre (PRC) CRRID, which conducted NFHS III for Punjab and Haryana.

Those girls who are lucky to be born, face untold discrimination and misery that are not only reflected in their intellect and economic growth but even in their physical growth. The NFHS III findings point out that while 38 per cent women in 15 to 49 years age group were found anaemic, this figure was just 13 per cent for men in the same age group.

The shortage of females will never translate into improved conditions for girls who survive. As experts have pointed out, shortage of females only leads to more crime against women, which may be very difficult to handle.

In rural Punjab, where there is lack of enough brides, the strong desire to keep rural family holdings intact is now driving a trend towards polyandrous unions. Here one woman is often married or bought for a clan of three to four brothers to avoid division of property further.

Polyandry - which may otherwise sound unusual, repulsive or scandalous - has found social acceptance in Malwa, with every tenth family of a village having it.

Many villages in Mansa district of Punjab have at least five to 10 such families where two or three brothers jointly take a wife. Though publicly the woman is married to one of the brothers, within four walls of the house there is a mutual understanding among them that other brothers would not make a marriage to prevent the division of the land.

The women are not only from Punjab but from West Bengal and Bihar as well. The main reason for perpetuation of polyandry is the highly skewed sex ratio. (In Mansa there are just 762 females for 1000 males).

Even hukumnama issued by Shiromani Gurudwara Parbandhak Committee (SGPC) threatening to excommunicate couples who abort female foetuses has done little from discouraging couples to seek doctors' services in killing their unborn girl children.

Besides breaking into the nexus of doctors, midwives and other people in the health system, the government needs to crack down on the kind of well-knit reference system these people harbour. The crime is going unnoticed with even district authorities like chief medical officers in some cases being a part of the liaison. "Asking a doctor to report against a doctor is like asking Dracula to guard the blood bank. It is the most organised genocide ever and we need to treat it like a crime. Apart from focusing on social factors and the mindset of the common man, the government also needs to net the doctors at the earliest," says Dr Bedi.

The writer, Tribune Correspondent at Kharar, attended a workshop on female foeticide at Gurgaon recently