emma_goldman
7th March 2007, 23:31
India's missing girls
Daughters aren't wanted in India. So many female
foetuses are illegally aborted that baby boys now
hugely outnumber baby girls, while a government
minister has begged parents to abandon their children
rather than kill them. What does this mean for the
country's future, ask Raekha Prasad and Randeep Ramesh
Wednesday February 28, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian .co.uk/india/ story/0,, 2022983,00. html
Bhavia is sleeping swaddled in a woolly peach cardigan
amid the wailing and flailing limbs of 20 other babies.
Nurses in lilac saris and face masks scoop the bundles
from rockers and jig them under the wintry Delhi sun.
Two days ago, the baby girl became the newest arrival
at Palna, an orphanage in the capital's Civil Lines
district. But Bhavia is not an orphan. She is what used
to be known as "a foundling", abandoned by her mother
in a local hospital.
When Bhavia came to Palna she was
nameless, with no date of birth. What is certain, from
a cursory glance at the line of babies, is that an
orphanage is one of the few places in India where males
are outnumbered. For every boy lying in the sunny
courtyard, there are four girls. Some have been dumped
outside police stations, some in railway toilets,
crowded fairgrounds, or the dark corners of bus
stations. Others were left outside the orphanage in a
wicker cradle, in a specially built alcove by a busy
road. The weight of a child here will set off an alarm,
alerting Palna's staff to a new arrival.
Almost always, it is girls who are left in the cradle.
Healthy boys are only deserted in India if born to
single mothers; boys left by a married couple are the
disabled ones. Not all abandoned girls come from
families too poor to feed them, however. Some have been
found with a neatly packed bag containing a change of
clothes, milk formula and disposable nappies.
Girls such as Bhavia are survivors in an India where it
has never been more dangerous to be conceived female. A
preference for boys, who carry on the family bloodline
and inherit wealth, has always existed in Indian
society. But what has made being a girl so risky now,
is the lethal cocktail of new money mixed with medical
technology that makes it possible to tell the sex of a
baby while it is still in the womb.
Although gender-based abortion is illegal, parents are
choosing to abort female foetuses in such large numbers
that experts estimate India has lost 10 million girls
in the past two decades. In the 12 years since
selective abortion was outlawed, only one doctor has
been convicted of carrying out the crime.
This hidden tragedy surfaces not only in the statistics
of skewed sex ratios, but also in the back yards of
clinics that hoped to bury the evidence. Earlier this
month police arrested two people after the discovery of
400 pieces of bones believed to be of female foetuses
in the town of Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh. Last September,
the remains of dozens of babies were exhumed from a pit
outside an abortion clinic in Punjab. According to
investigators, that clinic was run by an untrained,
unqualified retired soldier and his wife. To dispose of
the evidence, acid was use to melt the flesh and then
the bones were hammered to smithereens.
Last year, in a series of reports entitled Kokh Me
Katl, or Murder in the Womb, two journalists working
for India's Sahara Samay television channel found 100
doctors, in both private and government hospitals, who
were prepared to perform illegal terminations of girl
foetuses. In the grainy TV pictures, doctors from four
states and 36 cities talked with chilling casualness
about how to dump the remains. Many weren't bothered
about the foetus's age, just that it was a girl that
could be got rid off. The average cost of the procedure
was a few thousand rupees (around £30).
In Agra, one doctor told the reporters to get rid of
the dead foetus in the Yamuna river, which curves past
the Taj Mahal. "That is not a problem. Take a rickshaw
and throw it in the river," he said. In Dholpur, a town
in Rajasthan, a female medic said the fields were
pitted with the unmarked graves of unborn girls. She
told the undercover couple that if their foetus was too
big to easily be disposed of, they should pay a street
sweeper to get rid of the body.
The latest estimate of India's sex ratio at birth (SRB)
can be gleamed from a sample registration system that
covers 1.3m households. For the two years up to 2004,
India had just 882 girls per 1,000 boys. Only China is
worse. Beijing's harsh, yet effective, family-planning
policy limited urban couples to a single child -which
was usually a boy. China's sex ratio stands at just
832:1,000. Sabu George, a Delhi-based researcher who
has worked for two decades on female foeticide,
describes the first few months in the womb as "the
riskiest part of a woman's life cycle in India". The
sex ratios in the country, he says, are getting worse
"day by day". India, he says, now has 930,000 missing
girls every year. "What we are talking about is a
massive, hidden number of deaths."
Although ministers in India have woken up to "a
national crisis", the response has been to condone the
abandonment of female babies. "lf you don't want a
girl, leave her to us," Renuka Chowdhury, India's
minister of state for women and child development, said
recently. The government "will bring up your children.
Don't kill them". The announcement was a desperate
response to stem India's dramatic deficit of women. In
the west, women outnumber men by at least 3%. India has
almost 8% more men than women. The question for India
is what sort of future it faces without enough women.
One dystopian answer, given by academics Valerie M
Hudson and Andrea den Boer, is that a generation of men
unable to find wives has already emerged. In their
book, Bare Branches, they write of men who will never
marry and have children. It is these men, they say, who
are already largely responsible for social unrest in
those areas where women are in short supply.
Indian scholars, they say, have noted a growing
relationship between sex ratios and violent crime in
Indian states. When potential wives are scarce, it is
the least-skilled and educated men who are left on the
shelf. Hudson and Den Boer put forward a scenario where
large areas of India could be overrun by this under-
class, with marauding groups of under-educated
testosterone- high youths wreaking havoc. "It will mean
a stronger masculine and macho culture," says Den Boer,
co-author and lecturer in International Politics at the
University of Kent. "Men do change their behaviour when
they settle down. Those growing pools of men that don't
are more likely to congregate to take part in stealing,
gangs, bootlegging and terrorism."
In villages across the flat plains of north India, two
decades of widespread female foeticide is already felt
by thousands of families who cannot find brides for
their sons. One local leader in the state of Haryana
likened the lack of marriageable women to the shortage
of grain in a famine.
It is an apt simile, given that the response to the
catastrophe has seen women from poorer states being
traded like a commodity by bride traffickers. As little
as 10,000 rupees (£125) is paid to impoverished
families in Bihar, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh for a
daughter who will supposedly be found a job in a more
prosperous part of India. The reality is that she will
be sold into a forced marriage to a family in a richer
state.
So significant has the lack of brides become in Punjab
and Haryana that the issue has seeped into its
politics, engulfing local elections. Candidates
standing for office pledge that they will "help provide
girls" if elected. Village leaders are accosted by
unmarried men and asked to find them brides. Meanwhile,
activists say that trafficked girls - who are often
underage - are treated as bonded labour and sex slaves
once married. The groups supporting trafficked brides
are overwhelmed by the extent of the problem. "We're
losing the battle," says Ravi Kant, executive director
of Shakti Vahini, an organisation working on the
ramifications of female foeticide. "It is in every
village. The police are saying these families are doing
nothing wrong. There's collusion between the law and
the politicians, and it's destroying the whole social
fabric."
India's paradox is that prosperity has not meant
progress. Development has not erased traditional
values: in fact, selective abortion has been
accelerated in a globalising India. On the one hand
there has been new money and an awareness of family
planning - so family sizes get smaller. But wealthier -
and better- educated - Indians still want sons. A
recent survey revealed that female foeticide was
highest among women with university degrees.
The demographic consequences of mass female foeticide
are most pronounced in the most developed parts of
India. In Delhi, one of the richest cities in India,
there are just 827 girls per 1,000 boys being born. Not
far away, in the wealthy farming belt of Kurukshetra,
there are only 770.
At the heart of the matter lies the most sacred
institution in Indian life: marriage. New money has
raised the price of wedlock, a ritual still governed by
the past. Not only do most Indians believe in arranged
marriage, in which dowry payments are made; there is
also a widespread acceptance of the inequality between
bride-givers and bride-takers.
The bride's side, according to convention, is supposed
to give but never take from the groom's family. In
today's India that translates into an evermore
expensive gift list of consumer goods. Decades ago, a
wealthy bride's father would have been expected to give
gold bracelets. Today it is jewellery, fridges, cars
and foreign holidays - and the bride's family may end
up paying the bill for the rest of their lives.
A son, by contrast, is an asset to his family. Even
leaving aside the wealth his bride will bring, a boy
will retain the family - and the caste - name. He will
also inherit the property, and is seen as a way of
securing parent-care in old age.
Indians, therefore, have come to view the girl child as
a burden, an investment without return. A favourite
Hindi saying translates as: "Having a girl is to plant
a seed in someone else's garden." One of the results is
that women themselves face immense family pressure to
get rid of the girl in their womb. Feminists in India
argue that criminalising women who have done so is to
ignore how fiercely patriarchal the value system is. As
some see it, a woman who participates in the killing of
her own child is actually denying her own self-value
and should not be punished but be treated with concern.
Some of India's traditional attitudes are changing,
with women fighting to choose partners and different
lifestyles. In some urban parts of the country, live-in
relationships are tolerated. Parents accept boyfriends
in a manner unthinkable even a decade ago. "There's no
obvious sexual revolution, but things clearly are
changing," says Mary E John, director for India's
Centre for Women's Development Studies. But technology
is spreading faster than such western values. Clinics
spring up daily offering amniocentesis and ultrasound,
scientific advances that are capable of predicting the
sex of a foetus.
The trickle-down of cash means that even lower middle-
class families can afford a few thousand rupees on the
technology. Before sex-selective abortion was outlawed
in 1994, clinics would advertise terminating girls as
"spend 3,000 now and save 300,000 later".
Multinational companies began to sense a huge market
opportunity in the mid-90s in India. Every three years
the market doubles, and sales of scanners are thought
to be running at 10,000 a year.
First American, then Korean, and now Chinese companies
have pitched up to make and sell scanners. Some
campaigners claim that the American giant General
Electric's early arrival in the market indirectly led
to millions of aborted girls.
Although there is a law forbidding sales of scanners to
unregistered clinics and quack doctors, the campaigner
Sabu George talks of a widespread "indifference of
ethics". He says 16m illegal ultrasound scans have been
conducted since India's law was introduced. "How many
more millions of girls will have to disappear from
India before companies such as GE will recognise their
responsibility? " he adds.
General Electric counters that such accusations are
like blaming car manufacturers for road accidents. "We
support efforts to strengthen protection against sex
determination and misuse of diagnostic equipment," the
company says in a statement.
The diffusion of medical technology and India's
traditions are not the only reason for the country's
endangered daughters. India's medical profession, which
works in one of the most privatised systems in the
world, is certainly culpable. Some doctors, it seems,
will do anything for a fee.
Many of those caught on camera in the Murder in the
Womb operation were open about using high-quality
ultrasound machines to determine the sex of the foetus.
Under Indian law, however, doctors who use "sonography"
are forbidden to tell mothers the sex of the child. The
penalty is prison and a fine of up to 100,000 rupees
(£1,200). They were also undeterred by performing late
abortions - in some cases happily willing to terminate
pregnancies months after India's 20-week limit.
Despite being caught red-handed and on tape, a year
later just seven doctors have been suspended. Two dozen
are under police investigation, but no charges have, so
far, been brought. Many of the clinics continue to
operate despite campaigners staging sit-ins in waiting
rooms. The journalists have received death threats.
"Doctors are millionaires in India. They are
politically and socially well-connected. Powerful
people can slow and stop investigations, " says Shripal
Shaktawat, one of the reporters who conducted the
expose.
India's labyrinthine laws and its antiquated judicial
system have also created mixed messages regarding
abortion rights. The banning of selective abortion has
led to many women thinking they no longer have a right
to a legal abortion. Some feminists are concerned that
the campaigns against female foeticide have
inadvertently driven women to seek backstreet
abortions.
No one has any quick-fix answers to deeply held and
pervasive prejudices against women. The question for
India is whether girls like Bhavia, that abandoned and
unwanted bundle lying in a Delhi orphanage, will have
choices that her own mother never did.
Daughters aren't wanted in India. So many female
foetuses are illegally aborted that baby boys now
hugely outnumber baby girls, while a government
minister has begged parents to abandon their children
rather than kill them. What does this mean for the
country's future, ask Raekha Prasad and Randeep Ramesh
Wednesday February 28, 2007
The Guardian
http://www.guardian .co.uk/india/ story/0,, 2022983,00. html
Bhavia is sleeping swaddled in a woolly peach cardigan
amid the wailing and flailing limbs of 20 other babies.
Nurses in lilac saris and face masks scoop the bundles
from rockers and jig them under the wintry Delhi sun.
Two days ago, the baby girl became the newest arrival
at Palna, an orphanage in the capital's Civil Lines
district. But Bhavia is not an orphan. She is what used
to be known as "a foundling", abandoned by her mother
in a local hospital.
When Bhavia came to Palna she was
nameless, with no date of birth. What is certain, from
a cursory glance at the line of babies, is that an
orphanage is one of the few places in India where males
are outnumbered. For every boy lying in the sunny
courtyard, there are four girls. Some have been dumped
outside police stations, some in railway toilets,
crowded fairgrounds, or the dark corners of bus
stations. Others were left outside the orphanage in a
wicker cradle, in a specially built alcove by a busy
road. The weight of a child here will set off an alarm,
alerting Palna's staff to a new arrival.
Almost always, it is girls who are left in the cradle.
Healthy boys are only deserted in India if born to
single mothers; boys left by a married couple are the
disabled ones. Not all abandoned girls come from
families too poor to feed them, however. Some have been
found with a neatly packed bag containing a change of
clothes, milk formula and disposable nappies.
Girls such as Bhavia are survivors in an India where it
has never been more dangerous to be conceived female. A
preference for boys, who carry on the family bloodline
and inherit wealth, has always existed in Indian
society. But what has made being a girl so risky now,
is the lethal cocktail of new money mixed with medical
technology that makes it possible to tell the sex of a
baby while it is still in the womb.
Although gender-based abortion is illegal, parents are
choosing to abort female foetuses in such large numbers
that experts estimate India has lost 10 million girls
in the past two decades. In the 12 years since
selective abortion was outlawed, only one doctor has
been convicted of carrying out the crime.
This hidden tragedy surfaces not only in the statistics
of skewed sex ratios, but also in the back yards of
clinics that hoped to bury the evidence. Earlier this
month police arrested two people after the discovery of
400 pieces of bones believed to be of female foetuses
in the town of Ratlam, Madhya Pradesh. Last September,
the remains of dozens of babies were exhumed from a pit
outside an abortion clinic in Punjab. According to
investigators, that clinic was run by an untrained,
unqualified retired soldier and his wife. To dispose of
the evidence, acid was use to melt the flesh and then
the bones were hammered to smithereens.
Last year, in a series of reports entitled Kokh Me
Katl, or Murder in the Womb, two journalists working
for India's Sahara Samay television channel found 100
doctors, in both private and government hospitals, who
were prepared to perform illegal terminations of girl
foetuses. In the grainy TV pictures, doctors from four
states and 36 cities talked with chilling casualness
about how to dump the remains. Many weren't bothered
about the foetus's age, just that it was a girl that
could be got rid off. The average cost of the procedure
was a few thousand rupees (around £30).
In Agra, one doctor told the reporters to get rid of
the dead foetus in the Yamuna river, which curves past
the Taj Mahal. "That is not a problem. Take a rickshaw
and throw it in the river," he said. In Dholpur, a town
in Rajasthan, a female medic said the fields were
pitted with the unmarked graves of unborn girls. She
told the undercover couple that if their foetus was too
big to easily be disposed of, they should pay a street
sweeper to get rid of the body.
The latest estimate of India's sex ratio at birth (SRB)
can be gleamed from a sample registration system that
covers 1.3m households. For the two years up to 2004,
India had just 882 girls per 1,000 boys. Only China is
worse. Beijing's harsh, yet effective, family-planning
policy limited urban couples to a single child -which
was usually a boy. China's sex ratio stands at just
832:1,000. Sabu George, a Delhi-based researcher who
has worked for two decades on female foeticide,
describes the first few months in the womb as "the
riskiest part of a woman's life cycle in India". The
sex ratios in the country, he says, are getting worse
"day by day". India, he says, now has 930,000 missing
girls every year. "What we are talking about is a
massive, hidden number of deaths."
Although ministers in India have woken up to "a
national crisis", the response has been to condone the
abandonment of female babies. "lf you don't want a
girl, leave her to us," Renuka Chowdhury, India's
minister of state for women and child development, said
recently. The government "will bring up your children.
Don't kill them". The announcement was a desperate
response to stem India's dramatic deficit of women. In
the west, women outnumber men by at least 3%. India has
almost 8% more men than women. The question for India
is what sort of future it faces without enough women.
One dystopian answer, given by academics Valerie M
Hudson and Andrea den Boer, is that a generation of men
unable to find wives has already emerged. In their
book, Bare Branches, they write of men who will never
marry and have children. It is these men, they say, who
are already largely responsible for social unrest in
those areas where women are in short supply.
Indian scholars, they say, have noted a growing
relationship between sex ratios and violent crime in
Indian states. When potential wives are scarce, it is
the least-skilled and educated men who are left on the
shelf. Hudson and Den Boer put forward a scenario where
large areas of India could be overrun by this under-
class, with marauding groups of under-educated
testosterone- high youths wreaking havoc. "It will mean
a stronger masculine and macho culture," says Den Boer,
co-author and lecturer in International Politics at the
University of Kent. "Men do change their behaviour when
they settle down. Those growing pools of men that don't
are more likely to congregate to take part in stealing,
gangs, bootlegging and terrorism."
In villages across the flat plains of north India, two
decades of widespread female foeticide is already felt
by thousands of families who cannot find brides for
their sons. One local leader in the state of Haryana
likened the lack of marriageable women to the shortage
of grain in a famine.
It is an apt simile, given that the response to the
catastrophe has seen women from poorer states being
traded like a commodity by bride traffickers. As little
as 10,000 rupees (£125) is paid to impoverished
families in Bihar, West Bengal, and Madhya Pradesh for a
daughter who will supposedly be found a job in a more
prosperous part of India. The reality is that she will
be sold into a forced marriage to a family in a richer
state.
So significant has the lack of brides become in Punjab
and Haryana that the issue has seeped into its
politics, engulfing local elections. Candidates
standing for office pledge that they will "help provide
girls" if elected. Village leaders are accosted by
unmarried men and asked to find them brides. Meanwhile,
activists say that trafficked girls - who are often
underage - are treated as bonded labour and sex slaves
once married. The groups supporting trafficked brides
are overwhelmed by the extent of the problem. "We're
losing the battle," says Ravi Kant, executive director
of Shakti Vahini, an organisation working on the
ramifications of female foeticide. "It is in every
village. The police are saying these families are doing
nothing wrong. There's collusion between the law and
the politicians, and it's destroying the whole social
fabric."
India's paradox is that prosperity has not meant
progress. Development has not erased traditional
values: in fact, selective abortion has been
accelerated in a globalising India. On the one hand
there has been new money and an awareness of family
planning - so family sizes get smaller. But wealthier -
and better- educated - Indians still want sons. A
recent survey revealed that female foeticide was
highest among women with university degrees.
The demographic consequences of mass female foeticide
are most pronounced in the most developed parts of
India. In Delhi, one of the richest cities in India,
there are just 827 girls per 1,000 boys being born. Not
far away, in the wealthy farming belt of Kurukshetra,
there are only 770.
At the heart of the matter lies the most sacred
institution in Indian life: marriage. New money has
raised the price of wedlock, a ritual still governed by
the past. Not only do most Indians believe in arranged
marriage, in which dowry payments are made; there is
also a widespread acceptance of the inequality between
bride-givers and bride-takers.
The bride's side, according to convention, is supposed
to give but never take from the groom's family. In
today's India that translates into an evermore
expensive gift list of consumer goods. Decades ago, a
wealthy bride's father would have been expected to give
gold bracelets. Today it is jewellery, fridges, cars
and foreign holidays - and the bride's family may end
up paying the bill for the rest of their lives.
A son, by contrast, is an asset to his family. Even
leaving aside the wealth his bride will bring, a boy
will retain the family - and the caste - name. He will
also inherit the property, and is seen as a way of
securing parent-care in old age.
Indians, therefore, have come to view the girl child as
a burden, an investment without return. A favourite
Hindi saying translates as: "Having a girl is to plant
a seed in someone else's garden." One of the results is
that women themselves face immense family pressure to
get rid of the girl in their womb. Feminists in India
argue that criminalising women who have done so is to
ignore how fiercely patriarchal the value system is. As
some see it, a woman who participates in the killing of
her own child is actually denying her own self-value
and should not be punished but be treated with concern.
Some of India's traditional attitudes are changing,
with women fighting to choose partners and different
lifestyles. In some urban parts of the country, live-in
relationships are tolerated. Parents accept boyfriends
in a manner unthinkable even a decade ago. "There's no
obvious sexual revolution, but things clearly are
changing," says Mary E John, director for India's
Centre for Women's Development Studies. But technology
is spreading faster than such western values. Clinics
spring up daily offering amniocentesis and ultrasound,
scientific advances that are capable of predicting the
sex of a foetus.
The trickle-down of cash means that even lower middle-
class families can afford a few thousand rupees on the
technology. Before sex-selective abortion was outlawed
in 1994, clinics would advertise terminating girls as
"spend 3,000 now and save 300,000 later".
Multinational companies began to sense a huge market
opportunity in the mid-90s in India. Every three years
the market doubles, and sales of scanners are thought
to be running at 10,000 a year.
First American, then Korean, and now Chinese companies
have pitched up to make and sell scanners. Some
campaigners claim that the American giant General
Electric's early arrival in the market indirectly led
to millions of aborted girls.
Although there is a law forbidding sales of scanners to
unregistered clinics and quack doctors, the campaigner
Sabu George talks of a widespread "indifference of
ethics". He says 16m illegal ultrasound scans have been
conducted since India's law was introduced. "How many
more millions of girls will have to disappear from
India before companies such as GE will recognise their
responsibility? " he adds.
General Electric counters that such accusations are
like blaming car manufacturers for road accidents. "We
support efforts to strengthen protection against sex
determination and misuse of diagnostic equipment," the
company says in a statement.
The diffusion of medical technology and India's
traditions are not the only reason for the country's
endangered daughters. India's medical profession, which
works in one of the most privatised systems in the
world, is certainly culpable. Some doctors, it seems,
will do anything for a fee.
Many of those caught on camera in the Murder in the
Womb operation were open about using high-quality
ultrasound machines to determine the sex of the foetus.
Under Indian law, however, doctors who use "sonography"
are forbidden to tell mothers the sex of the child. The
penalty is prison and a fine of up to 100,000 rupees
(£1,200). They were also undeterred by performing late
abortions - in some cases happily willing to terminate
pregnancies months after India's 20-week limit.
Despite being caught red-handed and on tape, a year
later just seven doctors have been suspended. Two dozen
are under police investigation, but no charges have, so
far, been brought. Many of the clinics continue to
operate despite campaigners staging sit-ins in waiting
rooms. The journalists have received death threats.
"Doctors are millionaires in India. They are
politically and socially well-connected. Powerful
people can slow and stop investigations, " says Shripal
Shaktawat, one of the reporters who conducted the
expose.
India's labyrinthine laws and its antiquated judicial
system have also created mixed messages regarding
abortion rights. The banning of selective abortion has
led to many women thinking they no longer have a right
to a legal abortion. Some feminists are concerned that
the campaigns against female foeticide have
inadvertently driven women to seek backstreet
abortions.
No one has any quick-fix answers to deeply held and
pervasive prejudices against women. The question for
India is whether girls like Bhavia, that abandoned and
unwanted bundle lying in a Delhi orphanage, will have
choices that her own mother never did.