A friend of mine is pregnant. We ask her what sex she’s wishing her baby is and she says all she’s wishing for is a healthy baby. What she does let on is how her in-laws really hope it’s a girl.

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Which is refreshing and wonderful to hear especially because going by recent census figures, a lot of India isn’t really wishing that. More scarily, it isn’t just the backward regions where the girl child numbers are in steep decline — shockingly, the affluent urban sections too are under scrutiny here, more so in the island city than in the suburbs, for Mumbai apparently.

A report on Census 2011 data highlights that the island city’s child sex ratio plummeted from 922 girls for every 1,000 boys in 2001 to 874 girls for every 1,000 boys in 2011. In the suburbs, the drop was less steep — from 923 girls for every 1,000 boys in 2001 to 910 for every 1,000 boys in 2011. Basically, it highlighted how the drop in girl numbers in the city is almost four times that in the suburbs. Larger picture, though — regardless of birth in city or suburb, the girl child is looking to be more and more under threat. And the situation doesn’t seem too heartening for the state of Maharashtra either.

According to reports, health activists say around 55,000 girls are prevented from being born in Maharashtra every year — the state has apparently seen a 5.9% decline in the birth of girls. Census 2011’s statistics peg Maharashtra’s child sex ratio at 883 girls for every 1,000 boys (as opposed to 913 girls in Census 2001), lower than the national average. The state’s sex ratio is in fact lower than even Bihar, UP, MP and Rajasthan, places often highlighted as nerve centres of female foeticide.

 And if you must know figures for India, they’re no less horrifying — over 8 million girls are estimated to have been killed in the last decade, leading to a dip in the child sex ratio from 927 in 2001 to 914 in 2011, the lowest since Independence. Concerned social activists in reports have gone so far as to call this genocide.

In such a scenario, and worryingly so, the Union health ministry reportedly registered only 107 cases of female foeticide under section 315 and 316 of the Indian Penal Code in 2010. A scarily low figure, considering, as mentioned earlier, that activists believe over 8 million girls to have been lost to abortion, sex selection and the like over the last decade.

The island city figures, meanwhile, ought to be no exaggeration — city doctors highlight how the birth of daughters apparently causes consternation for not a few in hospitals harboured in affluent, educated pockets — families ‘forget’ to visit mothers who have just delivered daughters, especially a second or third girl.

Unfortunately there are no easy solutions to stem this saddening trend. It would help perhaps, on a philosophical level, to recall that many of our traditions worship a divine that is powerful in its feminine avatar — shakti is a she, as is our country a ‘mother’land. Should I also add here that three very powerful political centres — New Delhi, West Bengal and Tamil Nadu are ‘she’- doms?!