In a nation which is known to be one of the first ever to grant women the right to vote, and where according to ancient scriptures, women are portrayed as living symbols of the mother goddess, the practice of sex selection with a preference to male babies, including female infanticide and female feticide is alarming.
Among Indian beliefs, people feel that bringing up a daughter is like “watering another man’s garden”. Women are seen as a liability to the family, as upon marriage a hefty dowry is required from the bride’s side. Although the practice of dowry has been made illegal by the Indian government in 1961, it continues nevertheless. It is believed that a son will be more economic to the family, as he will support for the family and carry on the family name. A woman’s status in her family is more often than not tied to the number of sons she will bear: “May you be the mother of a hundred sons” is a common blessing given to a woman.
The practice of female infanticide and female feticide still continues in India and amongst many Indian communities worldwide. In 1996 the Indian government passed a legislation, banning prenatal sex determination through ultrasound, however due to the weak enforcement of this law, this has made very little change to the now disturbing trend of missing girls in India. “Statistics show that in the last two decades alone, there are between 22 and 37 million females missing from India’s population, and an estimate of 100,000 abortions of female foetuses occur each year”, says Dr. Meeta Singh.
In 2001 a Preimplanation Sex Selection procedure was developed by doctors at the Malpani Infertility Clinic in Mumbai, for the purposes of family balancing in India. “Developed from Preimplantation Genetics Diagonis (a process which enables the identification of genetic diseases in the embryo before pregnancy), the Preimplantation Sex Selection process combines the parents sperm and eggs in a petri-dish producing several embryos. Doctors take a single cell from each embryo and test it to see which chromosome it bears. Only embryos of the desired sex are implanted in the woman’s womb”, says Dr. Prakash Kakodkar. However, this procedure allows parents to choose the sex of their baby, and in a country where cultural attitudes lean towards the preference of boys over girls, this procedure has proved to skew the ratio of females to males further, rather than balance it.
In newspapers across India, Preimplantation Sex Selection has been advertised with slogans such as “Pay Rs5,000 today and save Rs5 lakhs tomorrow”. According to these advertisements, it is worth a family’s while to spend 5,000 rupees (or £70.96) for a sex selection procedure, ensuring the birth of a baby boy, to save the family a cost of 500,000 rupees (or £7,096) on a girl’s dowry; thus in line with Indian ideologies of wanting a baby boy over a baby girl, and furthering the gender imbalance in India.
In 2001 the ratio of females to males, was 933:1,000. Narrowing this down to the more prosperous state, Haryana, the ratio of females to males here was 861:1,000. By 2008, this had dropped drastically to a ratio of 300:1,000 (females : males).
The lack of a female population in India is making it very difficult for the men to find wives. This has now led to the buying, selling and reselling of women; the trafficking, abduction; sexual exploitation of women; marriage at much younger ages; and implementation of harsh measures to keep women under male control.
Baljeet Singh, a 37 year old truck driver, says he began to feel hopeless of finding a local wife once he turned 26. Men in his village consider it ideal to marry between 20 and 25. “I am a van driver, I don’t have many prospects and it seems that you have to have a very good job to get a bride these days”, he says. Mr. Singh used his lifesavings to marry a 16 year old Muslim girl from Assam, who according to village rumours, is an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh. It is becoming a trend for lonely bachelors to buy brides from impoverished parts of India with the help of “brokers”, who make a living of importing women into the country, or even kidnapping them, should they be unwilling to marry.
There are more skewed gender ratios in the more prosperous communities of India, as the wealthier families are able to afford prenatal scans and abortions, should there be finding of a female foetus (these which are performed in underground, mobile clinics due to prenatal scanning now being illegal in India). In fact, studies have shown that the richer the district, the higher the density of sonography centres and the poorer sex ratios. This means that it’s the more educated people who are guilty of female feticide, rather than the illiterate.
“It is morally wrong for the State to interfere in a purely personal decision of what gender a couple want their baby to be”, says Avtar Oberoi. “I believe the business that some scumbag doctors have made of sex selection is morally wrong, but I would still say that it is within the parents’ right to do what they want. If there is a way that a couple can choose the sex of their baby, and they can afford to do so, it is their right to make that decision. Who is the State to deem they cannot?”
In an attempt to protect the lives of girls, the Indian government has implemented some state-level governmental schemes, which have come up with mixed results. One of these schemes insists on families handing over any unwanted baby girls over to government officials, who then facilitate their adoption to childless couples. In another scheme, the government opens a bank account in the baby girl’s name at birth and deposits between 15,000 rupees and 22,000 rupees during her childhood (depending on the number of girls in the family). Evidence shows that this scheme has saved the lives of many female children, however these efforts are not enough.
Sociological research suggests that low sex ratios can trigger domestic and international violence. It is estimated that by 2020, there could be as many as 31 million surplus men aged 15 to 35 living in India, according to Vasu Mohan. The Chinese term for such men is “bare branches”, referring to the fact that they are not able to find spouses and bear legitimate children. “These bare branches provide fertile fields for recruiters for anarchist and terrorist organisations” says Mohan. “Governments will be compelled to find ways to reduce the numbers of these men and limit the violence they may cause. One easy solution will be sending these men to war –to give their lives in a patriotic cause”.
The Indian government appears helpless in the ethical war against sex selection, while the declining sex ratio raises many difficult questions about the welfare of India’s daughters, and the security of all its people in the long term. “While trying to change cultural attitudes is wonderful, we have to realise that these are not going to change in a hurry, and by the time they do, the damage will have been done”, says Nita Kulkarni.
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