Kolkata: A "savage preference for males" leads to the abortion of 700,000 female feotuses each year in India, according to a National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) member.
NHRC member Satyabrata Pal also said that 25 per cent of the children who see the light of day are underweight at birth, and 1.72 million children die before they turn one.
Chilling statistics
"The UNFPA (United Nations Population Fund) fears 2,000 girls are lost every day because of a savage preference for males: seven lakh [700,000] girls killed by their parents each year before they are born," Pal said.
The chilling statistics formed part of the Sisir Kumar Bose Memorial Lecture An Empty Cup: Human Rights in New India delivered by Pal Saturday evening as he detailed the many ways in which "we, as a nation, have failed our fellow citizens".
Dwelling on the dismal situation of child health, Pal said that children underweight at birth continue to be undernourished.
"In the WHO's (World Health Organisation) deeply shaming assessment, while the child mortality rate dropped to 90/1,000 in 2002 from 202/1,000 in 1970, the rate of decline slowed in the 1990s, just when the economy took off," he said.
"Because of our gender bias, the mortality rate is even higher for girls than boys."
World Health Statistics show that, even in 2010, India's record of immunisation was worse than that of Bangladesh and Pakistan, while the government's latest National Family Health Survey says the country falls way behind even sub-Saharan African nations in average percentage of underweight children below five.
"The percentage of underweight children under five years is almost 20 times as high in India as would be expected in a healthy, well-nourished population. It is almost twice as high as the average percentage of underweight children in sub-Saharan African countries," the survey said.
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