Men queue up to sterilise ... for guns

Bhopal: Guns go well with male sterilisation - so found out authorities in a remote district of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh.

Shivpuri district had, until recently, negligible number of men undergoing vasectomy operations at government-run family planning camps.

But things changed when District Collector Manish Shrivastava thought of issuing gun licences at the camps in the dacoit-fested region of the state.

Earlier, men thought getting sterilised went against their macho image. Men, therefore, used to send their wives for a sterilisation operation instead.

"Since people in this dacoit-infested district also have a penchant for guns, I thought of providing them a bigger symbol of masculinity [a gun] and told them to come forward for vasectomy," he said.

In the last camp 37 people underwent vasectomy. Last year, there were only eight cases.