Tuesday, 18 September 2012
Thursday, 10 May 2012
Ravinder Saini
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Female-foeticide-leaves-Haryanvi-grooms-abegging/articleshow/27794003.cms?intenttarget=no
| 9 days ago Unfolding at Haryana hospital - saga of abandoned daughters Tuesday, 01 May 2012 | http://www.nerve.in/news:253500461021 | channel: India | |
 "Sunita, who works with a women's outfit, told IANS: 'Haryana is already facing an acute shortage of girls. The next generation will have to face dire consequences if concrete steps are not taken to counter it.'" | |
| By Ravinder Saini Rohtak -, May 1 - A leading medical health institution in Haryana, not far from the national capital, is grappling with a peculiar problem - an increasing number of abandoned newborn girls who were brought there in a critical condition. In the last 10 days alone, four such baby girls have been admitted to the Post-Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences - in Rohtak, the hometown of Chief Minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda, 70 km from Delhi. 'Incidents of abandoned infant females have recently shot up in an astonishing way. Earlier, one or two cases that too over a long period of time would come to the notice of PGIMS,' Ashok Chauhan, medical superintendent -, told IANS. In all the recent cases, the condition of the abandoned girls has been very serious or critical. These girls were brought from different parts of the state. 'We inform the deputy commissioner's - office for further action when the condition of baby girl becomes normal. The DC's office later makes arrangements for shifting the infant to child care homes from PGIMS,' Chauhan said. Haryana continues to be the state with the worst sex ratio in the country with just 877 females per 1,000 males, as per Census 2011. In the 2001 Census, Haryana had fared worse with a sex ratio of only 861 females per 1,000 males. On April 18, an infant female with multiple infections was rushed to PGIMS after being referred from the Civil Hospital in Bhiwani district. 'The baby was found in a critical condition, abandoned at HUDA Park in Bhiwani. Now she is recuperating in the child nursery of PGIMS,' said Jagdish, a volunteer of Hariom Seva Dal, who is taking care of her. Two days later, another baby girl recovered from a dustbin near Ram Chowk in Gurgaon was brought here. 'The girl is now out of danger,' a doctor at PGIMS said. On April 23, a three-day-old baby girl with acute liver infection was admitted to PGIMS by her parents. 'While medical treatment was being given to her, the parents abandoned her April 27. The condition of the baby remains critical,' said Subhash Bhatnagar, volunteer of Jan Seva Sansthan, who has been taking care of her. Another baby girl, who was found near a bus stand of Dharuhera town in Rewari district, was rushed to PGIMS April 27. The girl is suffering from multiple diseases but is said to be responding to medical treatment. An abandoned baby girl was found in Sonipat district Sunday. In February this year, a woman fled after delivering a baby girl in the toilet of the casualty ward of PGIMS. Rajeev Gupta, chief of the psychiatry department at PGIMS, told IANS 'There is an urgent need to bring a change in the approach of a male-oriented society towards girls. Women will have to come forward to counter this distressing trend.' Expressing concern, Mukesh Kumari, a social activist, said such incidents were increasing even as women's organisations in Haryana were 'striving round-the-clock to alter the orthodox mentality of society towards girls'. Sunita, who works with a women's outfit, told IANS: 'Haryana is already facing an acute shortage of girls. The next generation will have to face dire consequences if concrete steps are not taken to counter it.' - |
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Campaign against Sex Selective Abortions
DOWN WITH DISCRIMINATION
SAY ³NO´ to FEMALE EXTERMINATION
Eliminate Inequality, not Women.
Destroy Dowry, not Daughters.
Daughters are not for slaughter.
Say NO to Sex Determination
Say YES to Gender Justice
http://www.scribd.com/doc/47889042/Female-Foeticide-Implications-for-India-by-Vibhuti-Patel
http://www.scribd.com/doc/47889042/Female-Foeticide-Implications-for-India-by-Vibhuti-Patel
Rooted Custom At the beginning of another wedding season, Kalpana Sharma warns against believing that dowry related harassment of young brides has disappeared.
November 2002: IT has taken 16 long years for a court to convict five people charged with the murder of a young woman. She was killed by her husband, his parents and sisters. The reason? She did not bring in enough dowry, and also refused to stand by and accept the torture and harassment that was meted out to her.
On April 27, 1982, Mina married Kamlakar Bhavsar in Nasik. Like many other women in this country, she must have entered her marital home not knowing that she would leave it as a corpse. Instead of finding happiness, she found herself being beaten and harassed for not bringing in a large enough dowry. Finally, Mina left her marital home and filed a case against her husband for harassment.
But the story did not end there. On the pretext of a pooja, Mina was lured back into her marital home on April 28, 1986 and mysteriously "fell on a chimney", suffered 94 per cent burns and died. Thanks to the perseverance of the additional public prosecutor, Pravin Singhal, the case reached the Bombay High Court this month where it was conclusively established that Mina's dying declaration had been forged. The order by a lower court acquitting her husband, his parents and sisters for abetting in Mina's murder has now been set aside. The five accused have been sentenced to three years imprisonment on one count and 10 years rigorous imprisonment on another.
This is just one case. And it has taken 16 years. There are thousands of such cases that never even make it to the lower courts. This is partly because of loopholes in the law. But it is also because those given the task of following up on the cases do not persist. Parents of girls who have been brutally murdered usually give up in despair and live with their sorrow. They also live with their guilt because in many instances, they encouraged their daughters to return to the site of the torture, and eventual death.
Thus, as another wedding season begins, we need to remind ourselves that so does the dowry season. "Bride Burnings", "dowry deaths", these are phrases we do not read about any more in our newspapers. It would seem that women are not routinely falling on kerosene stoves and being burnt to death as they did in the past. Perhaps there are more sophisticated ways to kill a woman now, particularly a young bride.
For even if the media does not write about dowry deaths anymore as it did in the latter part of the 1970s and early 1980s, when women's groups across India vigorously demonstrated against this regressive custom and demanded changes in the law, we must not fool ourselves into believing that the problem has disappeared. In fact, the prevalence of female foeticide in the more prosperous districts of this country, as is evident from the declining sex ratio, is ample proof that the value of a daughter has not increased over time. For the majority of families, girls continue to be viewed as a burden.
According to a 16 state survey by the All India Democratic Women's Association (AIDWA), the practice of giving and taking dowry, and the consequent harassment to young women, continues unabated. This, despite changes in the law, additional provisions in the criminal procedure code and years of campaigning and awareness building by women's groups and others. The survey, which drew upon responses to 9,000 questionnaires, confirms that far from declining, the practice has actually grown over the last decade.
What is worse, it has spread to communities where dowry was never a custom. For instance, Muslim brides get a Mehr and do not take a dowry with them. The AIDWA survey found that dowry has now become a common practice amongst some Muslim communities. Similarly, amongst tribal groups, the groom's family is supposed to pay a bride price. Today, the reverse is taking place and tribal girls are coughing up a dowry.
Somehow the urgency of dealing with this type of rooted custom has now vanished. Women's groups are engaged on a range of issues. But the dowry issue, which brought together a diverse spectrum of groups in the late 1970s, has virtually fallen off their maps. Of course, it is possible that this issue is not a rallying point anymore because women's groups have recognised that at root, it is not just one custom, but larger issues such as women's inheritance rights to property, equal rights and economic empowerment that must be taken on board simultaneously.
Yet, it is refreshing to look back two decades and capture the freshness — and in some ways the innocence — of those early anti-dowry campaigns. Some of this comes across in a small (in terms of actual size) book, The gift of a daughter: Encounters with victims of dowry by Subhadra Butalia (Penguin, 2002). Mrs. Butalia is now 81-years-old. She was considerably older than the young women who were part of that early anti-dowry campaign. What is special about her book is not just that she should decide to record her experiences at an age when most women presume that their life is over, but that she should do it with such charming honesty.
The book is simple, unvarnished and candid. It narrates the horror that a middle-class woman like Mrs Butalia felt when she realised that a young woman, who she could see from the balcony of her house everyday, was set on fire and murdered while the neighbours watched helplessly. "The girl was burning, she was screaming and people from the houses around rushed out. It was as if we were all paralysed." Mrs. Butalia was one amongst several women who did not remain paralysed. She was one of the first few women who publicly went out and demonstrated against dowry, followed up on dowry cases, helped to set-up centres for women in distress and argued for changes in the law.
The book is a record of those early years. Some of the stories are familiar; others have not been told before. The thread that runs through all of them is not just the crazed demand for a dowry by the victim's husband and his family, but the lack of support she got from her own parents as she suffered torture in silence. Women's groups who wanted to help the victims found themselves in a spot when the parents told them to back off — because they had other daughters who also had to be married off. "Married off" — that sentiment remains virtually undiluted two decades after the furor over the first bride burnings. And because of this, brides continue to be harassed, tortured, burned — or "killed off".
Kalpana Sharma
November 2002
http://www.indiatogether.org/opinions/kalpana/dowvict.htm
kalpusharma@yahoo.com, editors@indiatogether.org
November 2002
http://www.indiatogether.org/opinions/kalpana/dowvict.htm
kalpusharma@yahoo.com, editors@indiatogether.org
Wednesday, 25 April 2012
Glaring Gap
http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/may/25/india-census-alarming-sex-ratio-female-foeticide
India's census reveals a glaring gap: girls
India's census reveals a country obsessed by boys and sex-selection laws that no one will enforce. Continuing female foeticide explains why the child sex ratio is getting worse
• Families in India increasingly aborting girl babies
• Census of India website
• Families in India increasingly aborting girl babies
• Census of India website
India's child sex ratio has deteriorated in the past 10 years, now at 914 girls for per 1,000 boys; in 2001 the ratio was 927 per 1,000. Dumped female foetuses are also found regularly. Photograph: Punit Paranjpe/AFP/Getty Images
In the world's largest democracy a massive crisis of missing girls is unfolding, according to India's 2011 census. The latest census shows that the gap between the number of girls per 1,000 boys up to the age of six has widened to 914, a decrease from 927 a decade ago, at the 2001 census. In a country where a large part of the population finds it hard to get access to toilets and clean drinking water, access to illegal foetal sex-selection procedures seems easier.
The girl child in India is falling prey to the profit-driven ultrasound industry and doctors who commit foeticide without compunction. The child sex ratio is emblematic of the status of women in the country.
More than a dozen female foetuses were found dumped in a city in eastern Bihar state recently, days before the damning child sex ratio was revealed. Although there has been a fall in the rate of population growth(pdf), awareness of family size is accompanied by a greater preference for boys – a trend seen across class and rural-urban divides.
Mumbai, India's commercial capital, boasts a ratio of 874 girls, one of the lowest in the country. Jhajjar district in the northern state of Haryana, could well be the capital of female foeticide, with a ratio of 774 girls to 1,000 boys – the state's ratio is 830, down from 861 recorded in the 2001 census. Regions that had more balanced sex ratios, such as the southern and eastern states, are now also registering this trend andresearch shows that even Indians overseas demonstrate similar sex ratios.
Sabu M George, an activist with 25 years' experience in the field, said: "There are highly organised vested interests, a powerful lobby of doctors and companies selling ultrasound machines that cater to the sex-determination market." Doctors in India make at least $200m a year by conducting illegal sex-selection procedures, he said.
During 1991, in the prosperous states of Gujarat, Punjab and Haryana, 5% of girls were eliminated. Ten years on, in 2001, this climbed to 10%-15%; and 7,000 fewer girls are born every day than ought to be, according to Unicef.
Legislation was enacted in 1994 – the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act (Prohibition of Sex Selection Act or PNDT) – but that failed to act as a deterrent to potential parents and doctors. A public interest case was filed in 2000 by George and two NGOs, MASUMand CEHAT, citing the government's failure to the implement the law. In 2001, seven years after legislation was enacted, the supreme court directed state governments to enforce it, making special reference to Punjab, Delhi, Bihar, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra and West Bengal. But in the past three years the relevant government committee has not met even once to take stock of the situation, George said.
While an estimated 15 million girls were wiped out – simply not born – in India over the last decade, the figure is 25 million in China, where the state's one-child policy has become a one-son policy.
Chinese ultrasound manufacturers also see India as their big market. Machines that were meant to be sold only to registered clinics are probably being sold to unauthorised entities. Activists have also criticised companies from the west, such as GE. The company points out that ultrasound is essential for many medical procedures, adding that, while buyers require valid certificates and must produce "affidavits stating that the equipment shall not be used for sex determination … GE's observation is that these laws are not routinely enforced."
And it is not just the makers of medical devices who are taking advantage of the situation. Microsoft, Yahoo and Google, for example, have all contributed to the problem. The 1994 law prohibits advertising sex-selection services, often for genetic determination of sex, but those corporations carried online advertising, sponsored links, for sex-selection services. Another public interest case was filed to challenge the online ads.
These are signs of the stunted evolution in the status of Indian women. Not surprisingly, India ranks a lowly 112 out of 134 countries in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Index for 2010 (pdf).
The economic impact of women not contributing to society is clearly lost on many Indians, and the great Indian economic growth story has bypassed women's emancipation.
Natural selection would have yielded an additional 600,000 girls every year. This translates into 10 million potential brides after two decades. The horror of how this could unfold is best captured by a chilling, if slightly exaggerated, film called Mathrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women.
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