#dnaEdit: Save the girl child

India’s urban child sex ratio has sunk to a new low. Sex selection in an overtly patriarchal society seems to be the culprit

Latest figures put out by Save the Children foundation show that the urban child sex ratio, at 905 girls to every 1,000 boys (2011 figures), is lower than it ever was. Surprisingly the child sex ratio in India has been sinking lower every decade for the last 60 years, notwithstanding modernisation and the Women’s Liberation Movement globally. This could perhaps indicate that India is caught up in a time warp even as the rest of the world moves towards the equality of the sexes.

The major reason for the skewed CSR is the practice of sex selection — as indicated in last year’s UN report Sex Ratios and Gender Biased Sex Selection. Sex selection which commenced in the 1970s with the advent of Cytogenetics and ultrasound beginning at the AIIMS which aided the determination of the sex of the foetus in pregnant women is apparently still widely prevalent through the country. Despite the government banning it, quacks and fly-by-night operators are still administering the tests and anxious parents often choose to abort the foetus is it is a girl. The reasons for this are rooted in the patriarchal structure of society that we live in.

It has been pointed out that one of the major reasons why parents will abort a child if it is a girl is the large scale prevalence of the dowry system, despite the government banning it. In a poor country like India having to pay a hefty price to get the daughter married is a burden that parents could do without. Also due to the patriarchal nature of the society women are rarely given an education on par with boys and consequently cannot fend for themselves or achieve financial independence through work. Destined to become homemakers, especially in rural areas, they are relegated to secondary roles within the shadows of society. Given the sorry circumstances, it is a tragic reality that many parents choose to murder them within the womb itself. 

Noted economist Amartya Sen first coined the term ‘missing girls’ in 1990 to denote the number of female foetuses which had been aborted after sex selection. According to one study by PM Kulkarni (2007) there are 10 million such ‘missing’ girls in the country between the period 1981-2005. Currently CSRs are falling in large parts of western, central and eastern India — Maharashtra, Goa, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, and even Andhra Pradesh has joined the ranks from among the southern states.

Despite government incentives to having a girl child — the most recent being the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign by the Narendra Modi government — the reality is that even when girls are born , they suffer abandonment and neglect due to the nature of the society they live in. Besides being more vulnerable to sexual abuse, trafficking as well as sexual violence, even when embedded in functional families they are rarely accorded their rights in a society where primogeniture and male heirs are given paramount importance. This is a trend that  finds echoes in other patrilineal societies which have patrilocal village exogamy as well, such as China and South Korea.

It has been observed that, in cosmopolitan societies with less dependence on the male heir and where women are accorded importance, the CSR is relatively well-balanced. It is then a moot question whether there is anything to be gained by suppressing one half of humanity and the resultant suffering that occurs. As the world moves towards the realisation of the immense value of each individual, whether man or woman, will India still choose to cling to its inhuman social mores?