India's secret shame
Pastor Dale Morgan
India's secret shame*
One million baby girls disappear every year in India.
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
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 thousands 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 exposé.
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.