DNA Edit: Sex determination tests – Attempts to water down PNDT Act need to be resisted

The Supreme Court has done well to nip a potentially feudal and reactionary petition in the bud. Challenging the constitutional validity of certain provisions of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act of 1994, the  Federation of Obstetrics and Gynecological Societies of India questioned the inequality followed by the Act to treat minor anomalies of non-compliance at par with persons caught for illegal sex determination. This Act is popularly known as the law that bans sex detection in India before birth. The petition was a thinly-veiled attempt at introducing changes in the Act to dilute it. The court took the view that having a law to punish illegal sex determination and the government’s campaign to save the girl child had not yielded desired results. 

In the 24 years of its existence, the Act has yielded 586 convictions in 4,202 cases, a sentence rate of less than 14 per cent. The court has correctly stressed that rigorous implementation of the Act is an edifice on which rests the task of saving the girl child, while a low conviction rate reflects the challenges being faced by authorities in implementing this social legislation. The statistics of World Factbook 2016 of the US Central Intelligence Agency on female infanticide across the world has pegged India with a sex ratio of 112 males per 100 females. In the first sex ratio study in 1961, India recorded 941 females per 1,000 males. By 2001, it marginally rose to 933, and significantly in 2011 to 943. But between 2014 and 2016, it touched a low of 898. Given the slipping female population, the apex court raised an alarm over the low rate of conviction. 

The judges refused to find fault with the law, as in its view, the falling sex ratio is a matter of concern, as it not only impacts the demography of the nation, but also incites violent practices of trafficking and bride-buying. It is no coincidence that despite such low convictions, there have been concerted attempts to water down or even repeal the Act all together. India’s nodal body of doctors, the Indian Medical Association (IMA), has recently, for the first time in more than two decades, asked the government to repeal this Act. The IMA’s rather specious argument is that the paperwork doctors have to fill for every ultrasound visit to ensure no sex-detection activity is taking place. It is cumbersome and many a time, doctors mismanage the forms, but are inadvertently penalised as a result. 

If the repeal were to go through — which looks difficult at the moment — it is a dangerous future India will craft for itself. This is because while there has been a rise in social support schemes for the girl child across states, (like the United Nations awarded Kanyashree Prakalpa to West Bengal), gender ratios continue to remain skewed in the country. Despite the anomalies, the PNDT Act has had positive effects, resulting in at least an additional 1,06,000 surviving girls aged 0-6 years in rural India, or else the counter-factual world of sex ratios might have been even grimmer.