India's unwanted girls - female infanticide and reversed sex ratio

[desioptimist]

SRINAGAR, India: India’s only Muslim-majority state is seizing ultrasound scanners and enlisting religious leaders in an effort to save unborn baby girls from a shocking rise in female foeticide.

The issue has united politicians, clerics and social activists in Jammu and Kashmir, a state best known for the deep, blood-stained divides caused by a 20-year-old Muslim separatist insurgency against Indian rule.

Provisional 2011 census data released at the end of March painted a bleak picture of India’s gender imbalance, with a national child sex ratio of just 914 females to 1,000 males, the lowest figure since independence in 1947.

By far the most dramatic decline was in Jammu and Kashmir, where the ratio plunged to 859 girls for every 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group, down by 82 points from 10 years ago.

“We never expected such a drop,” admitted Yashpal Sharma, the Kashmir head of the National Rural Health Mission.

The global sex ratio is 984 girls to every 1,000 boys, according to United Nations population data.

Read rest of the article here
Kashmir’s ‘missing girls’ | World | DAWN.COM

 

[DelhiDareDevil]

This is massive problem not only in India but in asia too.

 

[arsalabbasi]

This is massive problem not only in India but in asia too.

This problem is also arising in the Pakistan also

 

[Hyde]

India's 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven - activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade. The BBC's Geeta Pandey in Delhi explores what has led to this crisis.

Kulwant has three daughters aged 24, 23 and 20 and a son who is 16.

In the years between the birth of her third daughter and her son, Kulwant became pregnant three times.

Each time, she says, she was forced to abort the foetus by her family after ultrasound tests confirmed that they were girls.

"My mother-in-law taunted me for giving birth to girls. She said her son would divorce me if I didn't bear a son."

Kulwant still has vivid memories of the first abortion. "The baby was nearly five months old. She was beautiful. I miss her, and the others we killed," she says, breaking down, wiping away her tears.

Until her son was born, Kulwant's daily life consisted of beatings and abuse from her husband, mother-in-law and brother-in-law. Once, she says, they even attempted to set her on fire.

"They were angry. They didn't want girls in the family. They wanted boys so they could get fat dowries," she says.

India outlawed dowries in 1961, but the practice remains rampant and the value of dowries is constantly growing, affecting rich and poor alike.

Kulwant's husband died three years after the birth of their son. "It was the curse of the daughters we killed. That's why he died so young," she says.

Common attitude

Her neighbour Rekha is mother of a chubby three-year-old girl.

Last September, when she became pregnant again, her mother-in-law forced her to undergo an abortion after an ultrasound showed that she was pregnant with twin girls.

"I said there's no difference between girls and boys. But here they think differently. There's no happiness when a girl is born. They say the son will carry forward our lineage, but the daughter will get married and go off to another family."

Kulwant and Rekha live in Sagarpur, a lower middle-class area in south-west Delhi.

Here, narrow minds live in homes separated by narrow lanes.

The women's story is common and repeated in millions of homes across India, and it has been getting worse.

In 1961, for every 1,000 boys under the age of seven, there were 976 girls. Today, the figure has dropped to a dismal 914 girls.

Although the number of women overall is improving (due to factors such as life expectancy), India's ratio of young girls to boys is one of the worst in the world after China.

Many factors come into play to explain this: infanticide, abuse and neglect of girl children.

But campaigners say the decline is largely due to the increased availability of antenatal sex screening, and they talk of a genocide.

The government has been forced to admit that its strategy has failed to put an end to female foeticide.

'National shame'

"Whatever measures have been put in over the past 40 years have not had any impact on the child sex ratio," Home Secretary GK Pillai said when the census report was released.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described female foeticide and infanticide as a "national shame" and called for a "crusade" to save girl babies.

But Sabu George, India's best-known campaigner on the issue, says the government has so far shown little determination to stop the practices.

 

[Paan Singh]

till 2020,there will be 77 girls over 100 boys..very alarming.

 

[Hyde]

Campaigners say India's strategy to protect female babies is not working

Until 30 years ago, he says, India's sex ratio was "reasonable". Then in 1974, Delhi's prestigious All India Institute of Medical Sciences came out with a study which said sex-determination tests were a boon for Indian women.

It said they no longer needed to produce endless children to have the right number of sons, and it encouraged the determination and elimination of female foetuses as an effective tool of population control.

"By late 80s, every newspaper in Delhi was advertising for ultrasound sex determination," said Mr George.

"Clinics from Punjab were boasting that they had 10 years' experience in eliminating girl children and inviting parents to come to them."

In 1994, the Pre-Natal Determination Test (PNDT) Act outlawed sex-selective abortion. In 2004, it was amended to include gender selection even at the pre-conception stage.

Abortion is generally legal up to 12 weeks' gestation. Sex can be determined by a scan from about 14 weeks.

"What is needed is a strict implementation of the law," says Varsha Joshi, director of census operations for Delhi. "I find there's absolutely no will on the part of the government to stop this."

Today, there are 40,000 registered ultrasound clinics in the country, and many more exist without any record.

'Really sad'

Ms Joshi, a former district commissioner of south-west Delhi, says there are dozens of ultrasound clinics in the area. It has the worst child sex ratio in the capital - 836 girls under seven for every 1,000 boys.

Delhi's overall ratio is not much better at 866 girls under seven for every 1,000 boys.

"It's really sad. We are the capital of the country and we have such a poor ratio," Ms Joshi says.

The south-west district shares its boundary with Punjab and Haryana, the two Indian states with the worst sex ratios.

Since the last census, Punjab and Haryana have shown a slight improvement. But Delhi has registered a decline.

"Something's really wrong here and something has to be done to put things right," Ms Joshi says.

Almost all the ultrasound clinics in the area have the mandatory board outside, proclaiming that they do not carry out illegal sex-determination tests.

But the women in Sagarpur say most people here know where to go when they need an ultrasound or an abortion.

They say anyone who wants to get a foetal ultrasound done, gets it done. In the five-star clinics of south Delhi it costs 10,000-plus rupees ($222; £135), In the remote peripheral areas of Delhi's border, it costs a few hundred rupees.

Similarly, the costs vary for those wanting an illegal abortion.

Delhi is not alone in its anti-girl bias. Sex ratios have declined in 17 states in the past decade, with the biggest falls registered in Jammu and Kashmir.

Ms Joshi says most offenders are members of the growing middle-class and affluent Indians - they are aware that the technology exists and have the means to pay to find out the sex of their baby and abort if they choose.

"We have to take effective steps to control the promotion of sex determination by the medical community. And file cases against doctors who do it," Mr George says.

"Otherwise by 2021, we are frightened to think what it will be like."

Source: BBC News - Where are India's millions of missing girls?

 

[Ajaxpaul]

Poor Education results in stereotyping Girls as a burden. Unfortunately doesn't seem to improve.

Look at the trend in a highly educated area in India:

The Hindu : Kerala / Kochi News : State makes big leap in sex ratio

Demography - Kerala - States and Union Territories - Know India: National Portal of India

 

[Leader]

its a crime to be father of a girl in india... its the fault in your society structure. unless you brainwash all your men, it aint going to change...

we can only hope that this crime in minimized or curtailed to control the rising situation....

 

[Leader]

if you guys didnt control the murder of unborn girls,

this might be what you all have to do...not as a cultural taboo.

 

[Ajaxpaul]

its a crime to be father of a girl in india... its the fault in your society structure. unless you brainwash all your men, it aint going to change...

we can only hope that this crime in minimized or curtailed to control the rising situation....

Brainwash...are you serious?? but what you said about society structure is true. People have to change. The thought of receiving dowry instead of giving dowry coupled with low income leads to this crime.

On a lighter note, its very difficult living in female dominated society

 

[Comet]

The solution lies in Educating the masses. Also, proper legislation to stop the alarming decline in the rate of females.

 

[third eye]

There is no denying or hiding from the fact that this is terrible & must change.

This is more prevalent in the North. I have found that in Kerala & WB there is little discrimination between a male / female child. Education I feel is the key. Alongside there is a need for state Govts also to pitch in with awareness programmes and making education free for a girl child up to Graduation level.

 

[Devil Soul]

Millions Of Girls Lost To Selective Abortion In India: Study

PARIS, May 24, 2011 (AFP) -Sex selection of foetuses in India has led to 7.1 million fewer girls than boys up to age six, a gender gap that has widened by more than a million in a decade, according to a study released Tuesday.

In Indian families in which the first child has been a girl, more and more parents with access to prenatal ultrasound testing are aborting a second female in the hope that a subsequent pregnancy will yield a boy, said the study, published in The Lancet.

The increasingly lopsided ratio of girls to boys is larger in wealthy households than poorer ones, the researchers reported.

Between 1980 and 2010, they estimate, four to 12 million girls were aborted because of their sex.

"Selective abortion of female foetuses, usually after a firstborn girl, has increased in India over the past few decades, and has contributed to a widening imbalance in the child sex ratio," they conclude.

The female shortfall for the zero-to-six age bracket was 6.0 million in 2001, and 4.2 million in 1991.

"Increases in selective abortion of girls are probably because of persistent son preference combined with decreases in fertility," the authors say.

The mean number of children per Indian woman fell from 3.8 in 1990 to 2.6 in 2008.

Selective abortion of female foetuses accounts for two to four percent of female pregnancies in India, roughly 300,000 to 600,000 per year out of 13.3 to 13.7 million carrying a girl in 2010, the study found.

From 2001 to 2011, the practice increased at a rate of 170 percent, slowing from 260 percent over the previous decade.

In the study, researchers led by Prabhat Jha of the Centre for Global Health at the University of Toronto, analysed census data from 2011 and earlier.

The also examined over 250,000 births from national surveys to calculate the difference in the girl-boy ratio for second births in families in which the first-born child had been a girl.

They found that this ratio fell from 906 girls per 1,000 boys in 1990 to 836 girls per 1,000 boys in 2005, an annual decline of a half of a percent.

Declines were much greater in mothers who had gone to school for at least ten years than in mothers with no education at all. The same trend held true for wealthier households compared to poorer ones.

If the first child was a boy, however, there was no drop in the girl-boy ratio for the second child, showing that families -- especially those better off and more educated -- are far more likely to abort girls if the firstborn is also female.

By contrast, "we did not yet see any clear evidence of selective abortion of firstborn female foetuses," the researchers said.

Unlike Beijing, New Delhi does not enforce the kind of "one-child policy" that led to the selective abortion of firstborn females in China.

The practice has left the country with 32 million more boys than girls, creating an imbalance that will endure for decades. In China, 94 percent of unmarried people aged 28 to 49 are male.

But first-pregnancy female abortions might increase in India too if fertility continues to drop, particularly in urban areas, the study warned.

A 1996 government regulation designed to prevent the use of ultrasound for prenatal sex determination is widely flouted, the researchers say, pointing out that few health providers have been charged or convicted.

"The financial incentive for physicians to undertake this illegal activity seems to be far greater than the penalties associated with breaking the law," S. V. Subramanian of the Harvard School of Public Health said in a commentary, also in The Lancet.

 

[xTra]

Sad, but unfortunately true.

There are strict laws about pre birth test, but these laws are always breaked.

 

[Hyde]

i created similar thread today.... MODs merged with different thread but i think my thread was bit different to the one they merged it.

Anyway - its already been posted at least twice in that sense