No country for girls

The Centre’s reply to a question in the Lok Sabha has pointed to a decline in the sex ratio at birth in 13 states and UTs across the country — including Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh — in the last three years. This is a telling commentary on the deeply ingrained mindset of a society that prefers the male child and considers girls as a burden best avoided. The dip also reflects gaping holes in the implementation of the government’s much-tom-tommed Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign, which PM Narendra Modi had launched in 2015 from Panipat in Haryana to help improve the country’s skewed sex ratio.

Though the campaign that involved an aggressive public awareness drive and a clampdown on sex determination centres had in the initial years showed encouragingly positive results as the gap between the genders at birth was seen to be steadily closing, the latest trend has undone the gains. The government scheme has suffered a setback also because the perpetrators of female foeticide have been a step ahead of the law enforcement system. Among other things, they have been using tiny ultrasound devices, which are difficult to detect, to determine the sex of the unborn child.

Rendering this unfortunate development worse is another horrific indicator of the continued preference for a boy — female infanticide. Cases from two states have hit national headlines in the past. A woman from Jind (Haryana) allegedly smothered her nine-month-old twin daughters to death with a pillow, while a man from Pune (Maharashtra) reportedly poisoned his twin baby girls and later killed their mother between December 2018 and February 2020. He and his parents have finally been booked for the heinous crimes, which were allegedly committed as his wife did not bear him a son. When will this shameful patriarchal attitude go?

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