Where have all the girls gone?

Namita Kohli, Hindustan Times
Email Author
Haryana/New Delhi, November 10, 2007

Faced with a crisis, even local elections have candidates promising brides in return for votes.

"My kismet brought me here,” says 14-year-old Heena, who’s come to ‘sasural’ in Malabnuhu — a sleepy village in Haryana’s Mewat region — from Kolkata. Originally from Bangladesh, the teenager can only blame destiny now. Last year, after a sum of Rs 6,000 changed hands, the ‘bahu’ found herself in an alien landscape: where Bengali is replaced by Haryanvi, rice by roti — and where cattle costs more than women like her, who are referred to as paros by the locals.

In the prosperous districts of Haryana and Punjab — where son preference has resulted in a skewed sex ratio — girls from economically weaker backgrounds in Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal are being openly bought in droves for ‘marriages’ that are more often than not without the consent of the girl. The legal status of such wedlock, of course, remains questionable. According to data compiled by Shaktivahini, a Faridabad-based NGO that takes up anti-trafficking issues, there are up to 50,000 paros in Haryana alone, including a huge proportion of minors.

Census 2001 shows that the child sex ratio in Haryana and Punjab stands at 820 and 793 per 1,000 boys respectively. But according to the latest health survey by the Punjab government, villages like Sansarwal in Patiala have touched an alarming 438 girls per 1,000 boys.

Ergo, girls are fast turning into a vanishing tribe. A recent United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) report warns that female deficit in the marriageable age (20-49) is set to touch 25 million by the year 2030.

The impact, however, is already being felt here. Says Dr Madhav Mohan Godbole, the director of Balgrah, a rehabilitation centre in Rai, Sonepat, “Villagers come to us and plead for brides. They say if we can’t fix them up, they will be forced to buy girls.” Faced with a crisis, even local elections have candidates promising brides in return for votes. Ram Prasad of Seoti village in Sonepat, concedes, “frequent trips are being made from all over Haryana to hunt for girls in Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand and even Maharashtra.”

In a typical ‘buying’ scenario, someone with ‘contacts’ in source states facilitates such arrangements in return for kharcha-paani, explains Rishikant of Shativahini. The ‘going rate’ ranges from Rs 6,000 –10,000, depending on the age and virginity. Forced by poverty, many a time the paros also have to ‘accept’ polyandry.

Interestingly, parents of local girls are now spoilt for choice. No one wants a poor or unemployed groom, says Akbar Ahmed of Malabnuhu. Neither are they willing to send their girls to the land of paros.

Post-Marital Blues

Gradually, the cultural impact of these forced marriages is surfacing. Meena, 30, a paro from West Bengal bemoans, “Men here don’t know how to behave. Their language, attitude are very brash.” The women’s movements are kept under ‘close watch’ and they aren’t allowed to visit home for fear that they might escape. “But at least there’s food to eat here, else why would we come so far,” sighs Mamta, a ‘bride’ from Bihar.

Even so, there are ample stories of abuse. Ameena, 13, was sold to a 35-year-old widower Ashok in Seoti, who was desperate for a bride. It didn’t matter even if she was a minor. “Ashok would lock me up in a room, beat me up and sexually abuse me. He wouldn’t let me talk to my mother,” recalls Ameena, who tried to escape a couple of times, before being rescued by Delhi-based NGO Prayas just last month. “He was so much older, and there was a lot of communication problem. So I was just supposed to say yes to whatever he demanded.”

Ameena’s was the first case of trafficking registered in Haryana, as women seldom register complaints due to social pressures. “There’s no complainant, no accused,” laments Sibhash Kaviraj, SP of Mewat. A local police official in Seoti says, “How can we go about breaking homes? Unless villagers inform us of such incidents, our hands are tied… it is their personal matter.” While many like Chandigarh-based Professor Pam Rajput, vice president National Alliance for Women (NAWO), have been advocating frequent compiling of relevant statistics and sensitising both men and women, the administration has clearly, been slow to deal with the issue.

Meanwhile, the chain continues to grow. As the UNFPA report states, it is the poor and landless men who will be most affected by this bridal crisis. Evidently then, 35-year-old Anwari who was, many years ago, married to a man 20 years older than her in Malabnuhu, is worried for her four boys. “They don’t study. Maybe, I will have to buy brides for them also.” Already, across Haryana and Punjab, it’s a common refrain, “Who wants to give girls to poor men like us?” To which, one Ram Dulari of Seoti chides them: “Who will, when you foolish people kill your own girls?”

(Some names have been changed)

Sex selection in India

ANIRUDH G.R.THE HINDU NOVEMBER 11, 2007

In ‘IT revolution and declining dowry practice’ (Open Page, October 28), Chandra Kommera has drawn an interesting analogy between the two. While it is extremely heartening to note this change in the bargaining power of women, such instances are still few and far between. For many, the birth of a girl child is still unwelcome. The sex ratio of India according to the 2001 census is a dismal 933 females per 1,000 males, up from 927 in 1991. These figures leave muc h to be desired.

A major concern is that economic and educational prosperity has not altered this long-held bias against the girl child. It is still a widely held theory that a male child will carry forward the family line. Another factor going against the girl child is the dowry which her family has to churn out at the time of her marriage.

In many areas, among the prosperous, dowry is viewed as a status symbol. Business families also feel the need for having a male heir. And with the trend of smaller families slowly creeping in, the girl child gets chucked out.

Armed with knowledge and money, access to methods of sex selection including female foeticide is easy. For instance, in relatively prosperous Punjab, the sex ratio is 874 whereas in so-called backward Bihar, it is 921 according to the 2001 census.

The mushrooming of illegal ultrasound clinics all over the country is testimony to the rampant sex-selective abortions.

And increasingly, for fear of being caught, these clinics seem to use symbolism to convey the results. They use blue or pink colour to convey whether the foetus is a boy or a girl. Or they make statements such as ‘Your child resembles a doll’ to convey a female foetus.
Hardly a deterrent

The Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act of 1994 banned sex determination tests. It provides for three years imprisonment for a first-time offender and a fine of Rs 10,000. This is hardly a deterrent given the huge profits the trade offers and the lax judiciary.

The rate of conviction under this law is one of the worst with the first conviction coming as late as 2006. This could be attributed to the difficulty in producing evidence in court and a powerful lobby which has virtually converted sex selection into a profitable trade. Of late, sting operations by women disguised as pregnant women have helped nail a few doctors.

This trend of sex selection is extremely unhealthy and can have disastrous consequences for society. Moreover, a society which denies the girl child even the basic right to existence cannot claim to be civilised. It is time the loopholes in the law were corrected. Strict implementation of the law can be the only deterrent to the practice, given that attitudes take time to change.

Tribals no strangers to female foeticide

With better education, villagers adopt city lifestyles

Where technology is not accessible, quacks are approached


NEW DELHI: Even as education and technology reach the far-off tribal belts of the country, the practice of female foeticide is also fast making inroads there.

Tribal youth are now going to cities or making use of portable ultrasound machines that provide sex determination ‘services’ at a nominal price.

The practice of sex determination and female foeticide was alien to these communities till recently.
Elders’ fear

Now elders in tribal villages fear that urbanisation will hit tribal villages as youngsters will fall prey to this “style” very soon, says a study conducted by the Pune-based Centre for Youth Development and Activities (CYDA), with support from the United Nations Population Fund.

This fear was expressed by villagers of Badi in Rajasthan, who said that as the educational level went up among their youngsters they tended to adopt certain lifestyles followed by city dwellers.

Quoting a social worker intervening in this area, the study says: “It is being increasingly felt that the issue of female foeticide is entering into the village settings dominated by tribals. Although in the programme area where we work there exist no ultrasound labs, our tribal youth are seen indulging in sex selective practices by going to the cities.”

There are also indications that in rural and tribal areas, where the sex determination technology is not locally accessible, people seek the help of quacks and dais (midwives) who prescribe herbs/medicines claiming that these will change the sex of the child.

Quoting another social worker in the area, the CYDA study says, “People also use traditional herbs and other medicine to have a male child or to change the sex of the foetus from female to male.”

Performing districts

India’s 10 best performing districts, where the ratio of girls is higher than boys, are mostly dominated by tribal communities, while the 10 worst performing districts are in Punjab and Haryana.

The best performing districts are South Sikkim, Upper Siang and East Kameng in Arunachal Pradesh; Bastar and Dantewada in Chhattisgarh; Pulwama, Kupwara and Budgam in Jammu and Kashmir; Senapati in Manipur and Mokukchung in Nagaland.

The access to information, means and technology, and the impact of the pro-sex determination perspective of the urban educated economically well-off sections have influenced some migrant populations of rural India also, a chunk of which are tribal. Technology inroads into semi-urban/rural areas have resulted in an increasing number of people there going in for sex selection.

In Maharashtra’s Akluj gram panchayat, a well developed semi-urban area with a population of 40,000, many unqualified people are using portable machines and travelling to interior villages to offer sex determination services on the doorstep for a nominal fee. According to a Tamil Nadu organisation, Rural Rehabilitation Centre, access to technology has led certain communities such as the Kallars in Madurai district, who were traditionally practising female infanticide, to gradually shift to sex determination tests and sex-selective abortions.

Her story: Fourteen girls, yet no son

Namita Kohli, Hindustan Times
Rohtak (Haryana), November 11, 2007

At 70, Krishna Devi is impassive about life — save a desire for a son, for which she ended up having 14 daughters. Her youngest daughter was born when she was 55, making her one of the ‘oldest mothers’ in the world.

“Yahan toh sab chhora hi chahte hain (Everyone here wants a son),” she says. In Bhalli Anandpur village in Rohtak district, Krishna is ‘famous’ for the sheer size of her all-girls family. “There were no machines (ultrasonography machines) to check, so I kept having girls till I was 55.”

Krishna, who had her first daughter at 15, is in sync with the social fabric of a region where the worth of a family is dictated by a son. In the third National Family Health Survey released recently, 90 per cent of women with two sons said they didn’t want to have any more children, while only 61 per cent with two girl children said they wanted to stop the family.

Unlike Krishna, villagers here resort to sex determination tests clandestinely: “If the doctor writes in red it’s a girl, if blue, it’s a boy.”

Incentives for the girl child don’t work, with only about 5 per cent registering for them. Says Krishna’s husband, Dayanand Lohaar: “I had to take loans for their marriages.” His eldest daughter Satwanti, 55, is a mother of two sons. Ask her if she’d got the ‘test’ done, and her silence says it all.

'Get a truckload of girls for the boys here'

November 11, 2007
Namita Kohli, Hindustan Times

Just over 100 kms from the Capital, a curious waiting game is on at the nondescript village of Bamla. Men here have gotten used to waiting for a bride — sometimes, for years on end. With at least 70 per cent of the ‘eligible’ bachelors unable to find a girl, it could well be a scene straight out of Manish Jha’s 2003 film Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women.

Azad Singh, 40, a shopowner at Bamla, says, “Fot the last ten years, the problem has been acute. Earlier boys here used to get married at 18-20. Now even at 30, many are unable to find a girl.” At least 500 boys are desperately looking. There are even families with four or five unmarried sons. “This is leading to great tension within the village,” adds Singh. With age, the single men become the subject of ridicule amongst friends who have “settled down”.

Curiously, while bride buying is de rigueur all over the state, in this village ‘single’ men are still living in denial. “Get a truckload of girls here and you will see a queue of boys in no time. But we don’t want to badmouth the village. We will try to hide the fault till we can for our honour,” says ex-sarpanch Sudhir Pehelwan. Sudhir says that after the local media reported this trend sometime back, the then sarpanch was forced to take his statement back, due to local pressure.

Ajay Grewal, who’s in his late 20s, has almost given up on getting himself a bride — even though he owns a sizeable portion of land and is a “state-level” wrestling player. Ditto for Sanjay Kumar Grewal, 28, a local farmer.

With a low female population and consequently more ‘single’ males, the fallout has been a rise in sexual violence against women. Says Ram Chander, a schoolteacher from the neighbouring village of Bhalli Anandpur, “Earlier, we could send our women to the fields alone, but now men around can’t be trusted. Rapes and violence are rising due to their desperation. It will take a lot of time for the situation to change.”

While Bamla village takes great pride in its male wrestlers, women here are still supposed to cover their heads and faces completely. “We don’t allow girls to roam freely outside, nor do we send them to work. That’s why you can’t see them around. They stay indoors mostly,” says Pradeep Kumar Grewal, a resident. Women, he says, are a “liability” for the middle class families like him and perhaps, that’s the reason behind the scarcity of brides.

Many like Pradeep have no qualms in accepting that female foeticide is happening on the sly, and that no one registers for government incentives for the girl child. “Schemes don’t work. The procedures to avail the benefits are too tedious. Sex determination is easy. Families decide on their own about their children.”

But with a scarcity of women, how do they intend to have ‘families’? “That’s the way our society is. We can’t really help it,” says father Anil Kumar Grewal.

After Punjab, Haryana, now bride buying catches on in UP

Tarannum Manjul
Posted online: Tuesday , October 30, 2007 at 12:00:00

Shahjahanpur, October 29 * Anita hails from a small village in Orissa. Five years ago, she was bought to village Shahganj in the Bhawaal Kheda block of district Shahjahanpur and sold off as a “wife” to Mahindar, a Pasi by caste, for Rs 7,500. Two children later, Anita still cannot talk to her “husband”, as she hardly understands his language. Moreover, the village does not consider her to be his wife.

* Meera Devi hails from Bihar. Rajiv, a Baniya, bought her for a mere Rs 8,000 two and a half years ago. So far, she hasn’t been able to conceive and Rajiv’s family feels they have wasted money on her.

If you thought the devil of buying brides has infected the states of Haryana and Punjab only, this might come as an eye-opener. In a district where the urban sex ratio is the lowest in the country at 678/1,000 and where the largest tehsil has a sex ratio of 535/1,000, the system of bride buying has become quite rampant in the last five years. Shahjahanpur’s block Bhawaal Kheda has several villages where, due to the low sex ratio, men have been buying brides from states like West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar. The price is anything between Rs 7,000 to Rs 10,000.

Shahganj is one such village with a population of around 250 families. At least 60 per cent of the families here have bought “wives” from other states. And the trend, which started around five years ago, is still going strong. “We have been forced to buy brides from other states because there are hardly any women in our villages. The number of girls is really low in this region,” revealed the village pradhan, Lalaram.

Incidentally, a survey has revealed that bride buying cuts across barriers of caste and religion. Whether it is the Brahmins, the Pasis or the Scheduled Castes — all are involved in buying brides from other states.

Asha Devi, a 45-year-old widow from Kolkata, was bought as a wife by Brahmin widower Narayan Lal for Rs 10,000 — the “wedding fee” given to her son, she revealed — some five years ago. Asha Devi does go to Kolkata, where her son stays, once every two years. She may not be able to speak Hindi fluently but since Lal’s family is educated, they try to understand what she wants. “Here, I have no problems at all. Being a widow, I was rebuked back home. But now, I at least have a man who takes care of my needs,” says Asha.

Ram Lali (her maiden name was Anita) was bought by Ram Bhajan, a Baniya, from Kolkata four years ago for a “wedding fee” of Rs 10,000. She has four children and is happy that this marriage has saved her from a life of poverty. “The money my husband gave to my family has helped them survive. So it is not so bad for me,” says Ram Lali.

For the rest of the village, these “wives” are mere “arrangements”. Maheshwar, an elderly man in the village, said: “We know these women have been bought and proper ceremonies attached to marriage have not been performed. Hence, it is difficult for us to call them wives.” Mahindar, who bought Anita from Orissa, says, “I bought her from a man for Rs 7,500. She is satisfying all my needs and is also my children’s mother, but my relatives don’t like to call her my wife.”

Non Governmental organisations (NGOs) working on issues of maternal health and female foeticide in the village, say the declining sex ratio is indeed one of the major reasons behind bride buying. Sunil Singh of the Rahi Foundation, an NGO active in the district, said: “These women, who have been bought as wives, have no rights at all. They are brought here only as commodities and nothing else. One can also see that women are being trafficked here from states with high povertly like Orissa and West Bengal because their families need the money given in exchange.”

Dr Neelam Singh of Vatsalya, an NGO working across the state against female foeticide, feels strongly against the system of bride buying. “Women are being treated as machines that can be used to produce babies and satisfy sexual needs and they are being bought precisely for these reasons. Such practices have become commonplace because of the low sex ratio. The administration and government should ensure that social ills like female foeticide are eradicated so that the situation can change in the years to come.”

In Orissa, boys too suffer foeticide

In Nayagarh, Orissa, it is not only the girl child who is destined to land up in the dustbin before she is born but the boy child as well.

Parents wanting to get rid of the foetuses of their girl children are duped into losing boys too, according to an inquiry conducted by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights in the state’s Nayagarh area recently. Of the 137 foetuses found by the district administration, some of them were of boys.

Said Sandhya Bajaj, member of the inquiry committee: “In their (doctors’) lust to make money, the parents were misled about the sex of the child.”

Most ultrasound machines in Nayagarh are of poor quality and incapable of revealing the gender of the foetus in early stages of pregnancy, Bajaj said. Doctors often lied about the sex of the child, thereby prevailing upon unsuspecting parents to opt for abortions, she added.

Inspections found that six clinics did not even have the mandatory license to operate ultrasound machines under the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Technique Act.

Some private clinics were found running a campaign against girl children. The message was that it is better to spend Rs 5,000 on an abortion now rather than Rs 5 lakh on a girl child's marriage later.

The well-oiled racket involved dumping foetuses into a man-made well to which chemicals were added for faster decomposition," Bajaj said.

The two government doctors were found to advise expectant mothers to their private clinics for sex determination tests.

Recommending strict action against the doctors, the panel has asked the Orissa government to conduct a survey across the state to determine how many private nursing homes are involved in the racket.

India facing shortage of women

By Julia DuinThe Washington Times

"Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbor's garden." -- Punjabi saying

PAONTA SAHIB, India -- By early afternoon, wedding festivities were well under way for Gagandeep Singh, 29, and Taranjeet Kaur, 26, in this touristy town in the Himalayan foothills of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh. Mr. Singh, the groom, works at an American Express office near New Delhi. He is seated cross-legged in a large, gracious white Sikh temple overlooking the Nagar River. His ceremonial finery includes a dagger and ornate turban. Beside him is his bride, her hands heavily hennaed with designs befitting a newly married woman. She is dressed in a magenta-colored gown and spends much of the ceremony gazing down at the floor. Nestled beside her like a flock of bright birds are female relatives dressed in brilliant jewel-colored tunics known as salwar kameez. In front of the couple are Sikh priests. They alternately pray, sprinkle holy water on the crowd and instruct the couple to circle around a low-lying altar as a trio of musicians tap out rhythms on tabla drums and a harmonium. Later, back at the wedding hall, the bride's father, Amarjit Singh, reveals he has given a refrigerator, TV, washing machine, clothes and a DVD player to the family of the groom. "This is not dowry," he protests, "these are just gifts the father likes to give for his daughter." Miss Kaur is his only daughter and later that evening, she sits in her family's living room as guest after guest shoves stacks of rupees into her purse. Eventually, a car pulls up containing the groom's family. Wailing and clutching her parents for the last time, she slowly marches toward the waiting car that will bear her 30 miles southward to Yamunanagar, the city where her new husband's family lives. "Indian brides handle these partings with great theatrics, often wailing uncontrollably," observed American journalist Elisabeth Bumiller in her 1990 book on the trials of Indian women, "May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons." "I decided this was the only rational response, given what was in store for many of them," she said. More boys than girls India is facing a shortage of women like Miss Kaur. In most places in the world, a mother can find out the sex of her unborn child, but in India, it's illegal to do so. That is because if she's a female, there is a good chance she will never be born. Roughly 6.7 million abortions occur yearly in India, but aborted girls outnumber boys by 500,000 -- or 10 million over the past two decades -- creating a huge imbalance between males and females in the world's largest democracy. Ratios of men to women are being altered at an unprecedented rate in India and neighboring China, two countries which account for 40 percent of the world's population. According to UNICEF, India produces 25 million babies a year. China produces 17 million. Together, these are one-third of the world's babies, so how their women choose to regulate births affects the globe. Female infanticide -- whereby tiny girls were either poisoned, buried alive or strangled -- has existed for thousands of years in India. But its boy-to-girl ratio didn't begin to widen precipitously until the advent of the ultrasound, or sonogram, machine in the 1970s, enabling a woman to tell the sex of her child by the fourth month of her pregnancy. That coupled with the legalization of abortion in 1971 made it possible to dispose of an unwanted girl without the neighbors even knowing the mother was pregnant. In 2001, 927 girls were born for every 1,000 boys, significantly below the natural birth rate of about 952 girls for every 1,000 boys. In many regions, however, this imbalance has reached alarming levels and it continues to grow. In 2004, the New Delhi-based magazine Outlook reported, sex ratios in the capital had plummeted to 818 girls for every 1,000 boys, and in 2005 they had slipped to 814. The issue is highly sensitive for the Indian government, which had given the nation's sex imbalance scant attention until this month. "It is a matter of international and national shame for us that India, with [economic] growth of 9 percent still kills its daughters," Renuka Chowdhury, the Cabinet-level minister of state for women and child development told the Press Trust of India news agency in an interview that was widely published in the national press. Mrs. Chowdhury announced plans to set up a nationwide network of orphanages where women can drop off unwanted daughters with no questions asked. "We will bring up the children. But don't kill them because there really is a crisis situation," she says. Yet the practice of "female feticide" is so widespread and deeply ingrained in the nation's psyche, scholars and activists fear that even the most vigorous attempts to combat it would require a lifetime or longer to restore nature's balance. "There has always been a deficit of women: Infanticide, neglect or they're left to die if they are sick, but technology has accentuated it," says Prem Chowdhry, a New Delhi-based scholar and specialist on male-female relations in India. "The volume has grown. Culturally, these things are not new, but now they're taking a new shape." Early this year, the British medical journal Lancet estimated the male-female gap at 43 million. Worldwide, Lancet said, there are 100 million "missing girls" who should have been born but were not. Fifty million of them would have been Chinese and 43 million would have been Indian. The rest would have been born in Afghanistan, South Korea, Pakistan and Nepal. China gave an even bleaker assessment last month, with the government saying that its men will outnumber women in the year 2020 by 300 million. One Geneva-based research center, in a 2005 update on the phenomenon, termed it "the slaughter of Eve." "What we're seeing now is genocide," says Sabu George, a New Delhi-based activist. "We will soon exceed China in losing 1 million girls a year." The date may already be here. In a report released Dec. 12, UNICEF said India is "missing" 7,000 girls a day or 2.5 million a year. Although India has passed laws forbidding sex-specific abortions, legions of compliant doctors and lax government officials involved in India's $100 million sex-selection industry have made sure they are rarely enforced. Several companies, notably General Electric Corp., have profited hugely from India's love affair with the ultrasound machine. As a result, a new class of wifeless men are scouring eastern India, Bangladesh and Nepal for available women. India, already a world leader in sex trafficking, is absorbing a new trade in girls kidnapped or sold from their homes and shipped across the country. As sex-specific abortions increase, the destabilizing effects on Indian society are bound to greatly impact a country with expanding economic and strategic ties to the United States. India's estimated $23 billion defense budget relies on military hardware from U.S. corporations, and the U.S. Congress voted in November to permit the sale of nuclear technology to the country. In September, The Washington Times sent a reporter and photographer to spend three weeks in different parts of India chronicling this problem. They asked: What are the cultural reasons for this genocide? Why is the government allowing it? Who is fighting against it and what steps can be taken to stop it?

Govt ready to adopt girl children to check fall in sex ratio

The government would soon provide home to an unwanted girl child.In a bid to check the alarming rate of female feticide, the ministry of Women and Child Development (WCD) has proposed to set up an orphanage in each district of the country where parents can leave their girl child, if they don't want to bring them up.WCD minister Renuka Chowdhury told PTI that the orphanage would be part of the crèche scheme that the ministry has proposed for the 11th five-year plan."We want to put a cradle or Palna in every district headquarters. What we are saying to the people is have your children, don't kill them. And if you don't want a girl child, leave her to us," she said.Under the proposed scheme, the government will bear the cost of the upbringing of the girl child, a step considered necessary to correct the skewed sex ratio of the country. The government is already running Rajiv Gandhi Creche Scheme for children of working women and the orphanages would be an extension of the scheme, a ministry official said. "This is part of our ministry's Integrated Child Development Scheme," an official said, informing that the proposal has already been submitted to the Planning Commission. Chowdhury felt that the scheme would provide at least a chance to the girl child to live. "It would be better than killing them," she replied, when asked whether the scheme can lead to parents abandoning the girl child.With the scheme, the government believes the gene pool will be maintained and parents, who realise their mistake, can claim their girl child later.Sex ratio as per 2001 Census in the country was 933 females per 1,000 males. The more affluent states like Punjab, Delhi, Rajasthan and Haryana had sex ratio lower than 875. The latest Census figures on infant mortality rate shows that death of girl child in these states is increasing despite government interventions. Chowdhury termed it a 'national shame' for a country whose economy is growing at the rate of nine per cent.Email Chetan Chauhan: chetan@hindustantimes.com