NEW DELHI: Up to 50 million girls and women are missing from India’s population, the result of systematic sex discrimination extending to the abortion of female fetuses identified by ultrasound, according to a report produced by UNICEF officials in India,
“The report, published last week, says that in most countries in the world, there are typically 105 women for every 100 men. In India, it says, there is Tess than 93 women for every 100 men in the population it “
Only where societies specially and systematically discriminate against women are fewer of them found to survive,”’ the report, entitled “The progress of Indian states,” says
According to statistics published by UNICEF, the United Nations children’s agency, the problem is getting worse. It cites census statistics: as showing the Fabio of women to 100 men has declined from 97.2 in 1901 to 92.7 in 1991.
“There is a widespread and growing use of ultrasound and amniocentesis to detect female fetuses and abort them, The practice is now spreading into the villages,” UNICEF spokeswoman Gillian Wilcox said.
“Families who wouldn’t’ normally kill ‘a daughter are now doing it through technology,” she said.
Wilcox said that although the Indian government had passed legislation last year to outlaw the practice, the effect of the new law had been simply to drive the operations underground.
Wilcox said the main reason for the widespread female feticide and the confining prevalence ‘of female infanticide in parts of India was the do system which although long prohibited by law, continues to play a sign cant role in Indian society.
Dowries and wedding expenses regularly run to more than a million rupees ($35,000) in a country where the average civil servant ears about 100,000 rupees ($3,500) a year.
Added to this the low status of women in rural India, where they perform the menial tasks of the family such as carrying water and firewood and seeing to feeding the animals, and it is clear where the roots of the discrimination spring.
UNICEF says that In India, girl children tend to be taken to health centers: less frequently than boys, receive less food than boys and are given less education than boys.
In certain parts of India, such as in the Salem district of Tamil Nadu state and in parts of rural Bihar, female infanticide remains quite common, Wilcox said.
She said that in Salem, the practice was largely restricted to one caste group, the Grounders, largely low caste agricultural workers, but that it was sufficiently widespread among this group to give the area the lowest ratio of females to males in the country.
The infant girls were normally killed under pressure from the father and mother-in-law. The babies were usually wrapped in a wet towel and left to die, given fertilizer or a rice husk was put down their throat and they were allowed to choke to death, she said.
In Bihar, it is the birth attendants who are given the job of disposing of female infants along when they clear up after the birth, They strangle the children or snap the spine by bending it backwards, or sometimes put them in a pot sealed with fresh dough to suffocate, social workers say.
According to the magazine Outlook, over 160,000 baby girls are killed in the state every year. The birth attendants charge 25 rupees (75 U.S. cents) for a live female birth, it’s says, and 50 rupees ($1.50) to dispose of the child.
“There is a saying in India that bringing up a daughter is like watering 2 plant in your neighbor’s backyard,’’ Wilcox said.” {P.L.12195)
Article extracted from this publication >> December 15, 1995
