The continuing practice of female foeticide has resulted in a lopsided sex ratio.
Any Indian woman alive should consider herself blessed," says Ila Vakharia from Gujarat. Vakharia is a senior programme officer with CHETNA, an NGO, and she has been closely involved with the Save the Girl Child campaign. As she dishes out statistical data that presents a grim scenario, India's most recognisable girl child, Sania Mirza, is losing her match at the Australian Open.
According to Vakharia and other campaigners, for every 25 women alive in India, one has been sacrificed before she was born, sometimes soon after birth. Lancet, a British journal, recently published the staggering fact that since 1994, India has aborted more than 10 million foetuses.
So why is it so hard for India to love her girls?
"It's not only India. All across South Asia and look at China. They are in the same situation of having low child sex ratios," Vakharia says. Acknowledging that culturally Indians have favoured males in the past, she says that much as the West would love to give it an exotic twist, the reasons for murdering girls in the 21st century boiled down to simple economics.
"It is true that only the son can perform the funeral rites of the parents in Hinduism, but if that's the case why are cases of female foeticide not restricted to Hinduism? You find low child sex ratios in all religions and the worst numbers are in Punjab amongst the Sikh community," she says.
Results of the 2001 Census show that the national child sex ratio has dropped from 945 in 1991 to 927. Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh and the capital New Delhi have less than 900 girls per 1,000 boys. However, demographers and statisticians say the census is not the best representation of the actual scenario, as a poor civil birth registration system makes it difficult to retrieve data.
Sociologists find it baffling that states showing a declining sex ratio are actually considered to be the more prosperous parts of India and in a bittersweet irony it emerged that technology was the main culprit. The proliferation of ultrasound machines, originally intended to detect foetal defects and correct them, was a blessing for a society that could now determine the child's gender and then act accordingly.
Though the country does have a Pre-natal Diagnostic Test Act (PNDT) that forbids gender disclosure prior to birth, Vakharia does not believe it is of any use simply because it cannot be implemented. "We have to change the mindset and that will take time. And we have to create the right opportunities that will make people believe that having a daughter is not a bad thing," she says.
Regardless of religious affiliation, the preference for boys is strong in an agrarian state such as Punjab because of issues of inheritance, carrying on the family name, helping out in the family business or agricultural fields and migration. In an interview, demographer Ashish Bose observes that "Punjabis are the most eager to migrate to the West. The propensity to migrate is higher for young boys than for young girls. In Haryana, the Jat community has its own tradition of land ownership, so sons are preferred. Son preference has even spread to South India. Social workers are saying the reason is patriarchy or women having internalised the value systems of men. The whole phenomenon is supply-driven rather than demand-driven and women feel they have a better self-image and status in society if they have sons."
Enormous expenses
The burden of having a daughter is commonly associated with the enormous expenses involved in feeding, raising, educating and marrying her. With dowry still prevalent in most Indian communities, daughters are looked at as what one could crudely call a dead investment. Sons on the other hand are the crutches that parents can rely on in their old age. Daughters move away and move on. Sons stay and continue the family line.
"If daughters could economically provide for their parents then they wouldn't care, but in a country that has no social security for its elderly, sons become an important source of financial support and nothing more," says Dr Sarita Mohan, a Bangalore-based gynaecologist. Mohan says that while it's tempting to classify female foeticide as a problem amongst the illiterate populations, it is not the case. Her patients are mostly educated professionals and they all ask her to reveal the gender. "Some out of curiosity but most because they want a boy. I have patients trying for a child who ask me if there are any specific ways to ensure conceiving a boy," she says.
And those who want a boy will do anything to have one. There are places of worship such as the Bir Baba Budha Mandir in Amritsar that is famous for its "give us a son" prayers. While prayers are harmless, doctors like Mohan worry about old wives' tales and grandmothers' recipes that women opt for during pregnancy.
Photojournalist Ruhani Kaur (see box), who travelled extensively across Punjab and Haryana to document female foeticide, recalls a case she came across. After the accidental death of her 18-year old son, Shweta was desperate for another one. Advised by a village quack, she consumed a concoction of peacock feathers, gold ash and other ingredients known to be laced with unhealthy arsenic levels. She did get her son, but due to a fusion deformity, he was still-born.
NGOs such as CHETNA are aggressively targeting the younger generations in schools and colleges to hammer in the consequences of female foeticide. And the consequences are chilling. In family-oriented India, where there is a strong emphasis on morality and values, Kaur believes there is already a disintegration of the family unit.
She estimates that the real numbers of India's missing women are 35 million. Some were killed in the womb, some as infants and others succumbed in their desperate bid to have a male child.
The rise in foeticide is only because of the availability of ultrasound machines. Before this technology was available, Vakharia says, girls were killed after birth. "How were they killed? Some were buried alive, drowned, fed poison, choked. It's always been happening. Just that now it happens in the womb," she says.
As the pendulum swings towards a lopsided sex ratio, women find themselves being tugged from both ends. On the one hand, they are pressured to aggravate the shortage by acting as fertility machines for male heirs. However, as the number of bare sticks or bachelors grows, they are also made to fill the deficit by being trafficked for marriage or even shared among brothers.
A ground-breaking attempt to depict this was made into a film called Matrubhoomi ? a nation without women ? where an entire village has no women and when one family finally finds a bride, she is ravaged by all the men around her including her father-in-law.
Brigadier Maindiratta, a board member of the Datamation Foundation, says India has to act immediately if a Matrubhoomi like situation is to be prevented. "What has to be appreciated is that if in our greed we are tampering with the natural balance and system, then we will be facing the consequences. Unfortunately in our society our attitude is invariably one of ?it can't happen to me.' Our effort and approach is to highlight the consequences."
Governments have worked at introducing schemes and policies that encourage families to have girls, but Ashish Bose says they should be more innovative and imaginative. It doesn't help that the government's two-child norm is often mixed up with female foeticide. Mathematically two children allows only three combinations ? two daughters, two sons or one son and one daughter. The first is considered culturally and economically unacceptable, the third is tolerated but it's the two son scenario that most try or pray for.
Dubious distinction
The state of Tamil Nadu has the dubious distinction of one of its districts having the worst child sex ratio in the south. No matter that the district in question, Salem, is one of the country's major textile centres, it still has to deal with the notoriety of killing 60 per cent of its girls within three days of their birth.
The state responded in 1992 with the Cradle Baby Scheme that urged parents not to kill their girls but leave them at government reception centres. The response didn't win any brownie points from the NGOs and other observers. They slammed it saying the government was indirectly encouraging the notion that girls were a burden by asking parents to abandon them, and many questioned the care given to the girls. Some even believe it didn't help in bringing down the female infanticide numbers as parents feared their girls would return to haunt them later.
Bose talks of Bangladesh as an example in implementing an innovative scheme. India's eastern neighbour is culturally similar in its bias towards boys; however, girls who attend school can take home a bag of rice for each month they stay in school. According to Bose, the government has to provide incentives for couples to have girls and prove to them that educating them translates into employment opportunities in the future.
"Acts such as the PNDT and the Dowry Act have to be implemented in letter and spirit. There has to be vigilance at a local and district level," he says.
Back in Gujarat, Ila Vakharia works in panic in a district called Mahesana, where the ratio of females to males is 798 per 1,000. "This is a rich, educated district. We are working against changing people's mindsets," she says. When I ask her if female icons such as Sania Mirza help in converting society's age-old fixed notions, she pauses to think.
"They help to a small extent. We don't focus on icons but we do use their example to show that women now have more opportunities and if they try, they can achieve more and can actually support the parents. But then how many of our women have such opportunities? It helps with the prosperous communities but in the villages ... I can't use the example of a tennis player. We talk more about education, jobs, empowering women and cooperative movements that have helped women become self-reliant and independent. That helps more," she says.
As the interview ends, we learn that Sania Mirza has lost her match in the year's first Grand Slam. Vakharia, Brigadier Maindiratta, Bose, Kaur, Mohan and all the others only hope that India wins hers.
Saying it with pictures
Photojournalist Ruhani Kaur chose to document instances and the consequences of female foeticide in Punjab and Haryana because they had the worst sex ratios. "I explored Rajasthan, Varanasi and Gujarat but the larger volume of my work is in Punjab and Haryana," she says. Her photo essay (featured on these pages) estimates that there are 35 million females missing in India today. As the situation gets more and more precarious, cracks in the walls of the family unit are beginning to show.
Kaur, a Punjabi, says she was "initially shocked to know Sikhs were up there among the most criminal with regard to killing their girls. Since my childhood was spent in Delhi, my interaction with my grandparents' home was limited to an annual visit, but belonging to a family with an ayurvedic background, many people coming to take tablets to have sons is a very distinctive memory I have."
The journey of researching and documenting the issue was a mixed one for Kaur. "It was ridden with challenges and discoveries. The illegal and personal nature of the issue made finding and getting access to the cases I covered very difficult. The many underlying nuances made communication through a two-dimensional visual medium like photography testing," she says.
Strange mix
Her research revealed that it was a strange mix of religions, heritage, pension and property-related issues that prompted a preference for boys. "Going to heaven only if your son lights your pyre, girls leave and go to their own houses, huge dowry demands on daughters' weddings, fear of the lack of security for girls, fear of girls going astray and scarring family honour, boys stay back and look after you in your old age, boys take the family name forward, somebody to inherit the family property are all reasons," she says. However, Kaur thinks that right now there is no individual reason as it has become such an inherently deep-rooted sentiment that any rationale to support this perspective is hardly thought about. "It's a given," she says.
The many interactions she had with doctors and families have led her to conclude that counselling efforts would only be futile. "People are very clear and pre-determined in this course of action. The only possible scare is the punishment they would get if found out. However, hardly any cases against doctors and families indulging in sex selection have seen the light of day," she says.
From her side, Kaur has focused more on the repercussions of a nation without women as opposed to extolling the virtues of women. It is after all, not a battle of the sexes, but a question of survival for one of them.
