Women in India: The Missing Girl Child

A few years ago Manish Jha’s first feature film Matrubhoomi shocked a nation which had been touted as one the world’s emerging economic giants. In Matrubhoomi a village girl Kalki is married off to five men because the dearth of women in the village helps rewrite the rules of marriage and conjugality. Matrubhoomi is a futuristic vision of India, albeit a bleak one. The sex ratio in this bleak future is adverse to the extent that reenactments of the Pandavas conquest of Draupadi are almost commonplace. Matrubhoomi’s India is not an economic giant. It is instead an India where the perpetuation of a regressive mindset has destroyed the sanctity of the feminine. It is in this future that Kalki seeks to find her identity as a human first, an individual, a woman and a mother. Kalki's story is heartbreaking. It breathes and seethes at the intersection of family, caste, religion, class and gender. As each of her husbands exercises his conjugal rights over her in turn she is likened to cattle, she is repeatedly raped and becomes a sub-human being, stripped off her rights, her clothes, her dignity.

In 1994 the Supreme Court implemented the Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act. Under this Act, state governments were issued directives to take steps to ensure that gender determination through ultrasound and amniocentesis did not occur. In 2002, the Supreme Court hauled up the governments of Punjab, Haryana, UP, Bihar, Gujarat, West Bengal, Maharashtra, Kerala, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh and inquired about the steps taken to curb female feticide. CEHAT, the petitioner, claimed that these governments had actually been giving licenses to ultrasound clinics and so had undermined the Supreme Court’s judgment. With the introduction of portable ultrasound machines doctors visit villages in India and offer gender selection services.

Last year a first year medical student from UCSF-Berkeley, Sunita Puri, outlined the extent of sex-selection among the Bay Area’s South Asian families (mostly Indians). The birth of a female child led to the ill-treatment of the mother at the hands of her in-laws and husband in the Bay Area. Many Indian wives across the region suffer under abusive husbands, whose only claim to fame is their job profile which more often than not boasts of an impressive engineering degree from reputed institutions across India and the world.

Gen-Select is a small American firm that specializes in medical kits that help determine the sex of a fetus. Women can program their fetuses simply by taking some “nutriceuticals” and sticking to a certain diet plan and conjugal schedule. GenSelect placed an innocuous advertisement in an Indian newspaper and according to the management it received an overwhelming response form its Indian market. Priced at about 200 to 450 dollars, a customer can get this FDA approved kit and have a baby of either sex. In India the kit was offered for about 6000 INR. The company also assures customers of a 96% success rate with the gender selection process and even offers a money back guarantee if the procedure fails.

The above information is an attempt by me to contextualize the magnitude of the problem confronting the missing girl child in India. Matrubhoomi shocked audiences throughout the country, but many did not bother to look at the present day situation in the country where sex-selective abortions, although deemed illegal, continue to occur. A British medical journal recently reported that over the last decade or so oven 10 million female fetuses have been aborted in India by families and individuals keen on begetting a male heir. The sex ratio according to the 2001 census on an average for India is 933:1000. Northern Indian states have lower sex ratios as compared to their southern counterparts. However, since 1986, southern Indian states with the exception of Kerala have not done too well either on the sex ratio front. Arnold and Roy claim that the sex ratios at birth for children whose mothers had ultrasound or amniocentesis “about 5 per cent of female foetuses in India are aborted among women who have these tests. In Haryana, it is estimated that 43 per cent of the female foetuses are likely to have been aborted for these same women. Another indication of the use of sex selective abortions in India is the very low sex ratios of births to women with no living sons, particularly in states with strong parental preferences for sons.”

We can invoke countless figures that testify to the magnitude of the problem before the country. The problem stated simply is this – we are a nation that kills off our girl children. The girl child is ‘missing’, because she is not allowed to live.

In India abortion is not illegal. Indeed the very foundation of population control in India rests on the existence of legal abortion. In fact if abortion were illegal, abortion related deaths in India would increase amongst the category of young fertile women since they would be conducted by unskilled doctors and quacks under unhygienic conditions using questionable practices.

On the surface there is really nothing amiss about detecting the state of a fetus. Ultrasounds help detect deformities in a fetus and may help in overcoming obstacles during childbirth. However, there is really no way of stopping a doctor from determining the sex of a fetus. Many families in turn when given this information choose to abort a female fetus. Why does this happen? It is not big mystery that in India sons are preferred over daughters. Daughters are seen as liabilities and any expenditure on daughters is done reluctantly since the only possible life path open to a daughter is that of a wife. Sons on the other hand are seen as assets who will turn into bread winners later on in life and take care of aged parents. Be it discrimination in employment, education, capability enhancement, or even religious practice, Indian women have lived under the bell-jar like oppression of this mindset for centuries.

Dreze and Sen in their study of female education in India revealed the low enrollment rates and high dropout rates in female primary school enrollment in north Indian states and concluded that one of the factors that contributed to this was a traditional mindset that saw expenditure on female education as wasteful.

There is a pressing need to highlight the overall impact of a conservative and militant mindset on the life chances of the girl child. The reason I choose to write about this is because this mindset is not endemic only to India, but has in fact migrated to foreign shores. Puri’s account of the disturbing trends amongst South Asian families in the Bay Areas leads me to a larger issue about the migration of ideas. It is obvious then that level and extent of education and economic security has very little to do with the destruction of certain notions. The danger really arises from men and women who perpetuate such beliefs and notions in the process delivering a shattering blow to any notion of progress we may take pride in.

Products like GenSelect are another weapon for the anti-girl child individuals and families in India. Less torturous than methods like selective abortion, the product nevertheless contributes to the growing problem of missing women in India.

Even though the 2001 Census recorded an increase in the sex ratio for the second time in five decades, the troubling figure is not the average sex ratio, but is in fact the sex ratio in the 0-6 age group. The 2001 Census reveals that the child sex ration dropped from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2002. Each state also registered a decline with the exceptions of Kerala, Sikkim, Mizoram and Tripura where an increase was recorded. In Punjab the ratio fell 82 points to 793, by 59 points in Haryana, 54 points in Himachal Pradesh and Chandigarh, 50 points in Gujarat and Delhi and 42 points in Uttaranchal. Many people have explained the vicissitudes of the sex ratio in India as a result of migrations across the country or problems in census data collection. However, the consistency of certain figures like that of the child sex ratio is disconcerting to the extent that the repeated patters across the same states testify to the fact that there may indeed be a deeper problem.

There are a number of reasons that I can identify that contribute to the adverse sex ratio. First, the son-preference maxim is still strong across India and even more deeply entrenched in north Indian states. Second, the lack of concerted pressure from society as a whole translates into sex selection as a legally unacceptable but socially sanctioned practice. Third, the failure of the legal system at various levels compounds the problem. While acts are fine in letter and spirit, the lack of political will to enforce them and mete out punishment to people indulging in sex selection is absent. Fourth, the awareness of the missing girl child as a problem confronting the country exists only in a very elite circle of activists, academicians, and professionals. The vast majority of the country is not concerned with indicators like the sex ratio and the general apathy of people results in little popular activism against the problem.