There’s a story attached to the birth of Lord Krishna, the presiding deity of the pantheon of Hindu gods. Krishna’s maternal uncle, Kamsa, decided to kill all his sister’s babies when the gods told him that his sister’s child would overthrow his cruel regime and kill him. When Krishna was born, his father escaped from prison with the baby, and took him across the river to Yashoda, a milkmaid. In exchange Yashoda gave the father her own baby girl who was taken by the prison guards to be another niece of Kamsa and so killed. However, since the girl was a goddess, she dematerialized before she could die, spoke to Kamsa from the heavens and told him his death was nigh. This story is retold every year on the occasion of Krishna’s birth, as an intrinsic part of the sequence of events in Krishna’s life. It is also one of the first instances of a girl child being placed firmly second in the male-female hierarchy, and being killed to save a boy.

Traditionally, Indian society has treated women as the undesirable sex. Female literacy, nutrition, health, are all far below the average for the male, across all parts of India. Hindu scriptures legitimize the status of women as second-class citizens, with some categorizing them below the outcastes in the Hindu caste system.

On social parameters, females lag significantly behind males. Female literacy is 54 per cent while male literacy is 75 per cent for the whole country. In matters of health and nutrition, females traditionally take a backseat to males, and even a pregnant woman considers it normal to starve if there’s a choice between feeding herself or the males of her family.

Is it any wonder then that females in India are considered a plague, to be exterminated sooner rather than later? In the last 20 years, ten million girls have been killed by their parents. The deaths can be in utero or after the child is born. Though female mortality in the age group of 0—6 has always been higher than male mortality on account of poorer nutrition and immunization, and the practice of killing female infants after birth is widespread in some communities, the trend of female foeticide is a comparatively recent one.

Female foeticide and infanticide have become so commonplace that the Indian Minister of State for Women and Child Development, Ms. Renuka Choudhury, has proposed the cradle scheme by which parents can deposit unwanted girl children at the doorstep of government cradle centres anonymously. Eventually, the government hopes, these children will be sent to adoption centres for adoption by families. Like every scheme, this too is one which is not all-win. On the benefit side, it shows that the state recognizes the problem of India’s missing girl children, and finds itself responsible for stemming this trend. But the danger of this scheme far outweighs any benefits. The scheme almost legitimizes the parents’ right to get rid of unwanted girl children while retaining boys within the family fold. Socially it means, if implemented on a significantly large enough scale, that India will have an entire class of females reared outside a family environment. How will this affect these females’ ability to raise a family themselves, especially since they will know that they were abandoned by their parents? And what will be the level of their own commitment to raising girl children within the family fold? The scheme is still at the proposal stage, though budgetary sanctions have already been sought. Given the below-average quality of all state services in the country, it is apparent that this initiative is not going to yield the desired results, as can be seen by its failure in the one state where it was launched, way back in 1992, in Tamil Nadu.

Internationally, without Asia, the male-female ratio for children below the age of 6 is 1.03. The average for India is 1.07. The highest, at 1.25, is in the state of Punjab. There are two underlying causes for the alarming decline in the number of girls. One, of course, is social. Females are considered a burden financially, and a liability economically. Traditionally, parents are forced to incur debt to raise funds for their daughters’ wedding dowry. Parents of boys consider it well within their rights to harass their daughter-in-law if she brings an inadequate dowry. In extreme cases, women can even be killed on this issue alone. Reports of torture of women by their husbands and in-laws for more dowry are fairly common. On the economic front, girls are considered a non-productive part of the family. Though girls in rural areas are inducted to tend cattle, fetch water, do housework and look after their younger siblings while their mothers go to the fields, none of this is considered economic activity. Boys, on the other hand, do more quantitatively measurable work in the form of tending the bullocks, helping their fathers in the fields and working during sowing and harvesting seasons.

Social discrimination against females has always existed in India. But its manifestation in the sharp decline in the number of girl children is a modern phenomenon, and this is distinctly a state-related issue. The faster decline in girl children in the last twenty years is largely attributable to sex-selective abortions, which are made possible by scanning techniques that reveal the sex of the female as early as the third month. The state, waking up eventually to the unethical use of sex determination tests, outlawed them, and medical practitioners were barred from revealing the sex of the foetus to the parents. The law, Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act 1994, amended to the Preconception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (PNDT) Act, 2003 specifies the penalty if a doctor is caught indulging in this practice. The penalty includes a fine of up to Rs.10 000 ($250) and a jail term of 3 years. On paper, the law would seem to act as a successful deterrent since only one doctor has been punished under it in the 13 years that the law has been in force. The reality is something else. The technology of sex determination tests has progressed to mobile sonography machines that can be used in the more remote villages, particularly in the northern states of Punjab and Haryana, where the sex ratio is amongst the worst. The failure to implement the law and the abysmal conviction rate of doctors proves how the state is almost complicit in the practice of female foeticide. The medical fraternity, for its part, has refused to accept its responsibility in encouraging sex-selective abortions, and has protected its members from any penal action. Social acceptance of the fact of female inferiority has led to the police turning a blind eye to clinics doing abortions on a mass scale. In a recent case, a quack in Haryana, the state with one of the worst sex ratios in the entire country, was found to conduct illegal abortions and dump the foetuses in a neighbouring sewer. Though all ultrasound machines are required to be registered with the state authorities, this doctor was found to be in illegal possession of a mobile ultrasound unit. He is not the only one. Many doctors, particularly in the states of Haryana and Punjab, use illegal ultrasound machines for pre-natal sex determination tests. Rising income in the rural areas and small towns of these states has ensured that more and more people can afford to go in for this technology and the ensuing abortions.

Globalisation seems to be the magic mantra to address many of the ills besetting India, but in the case of the missing girl children, it has actually exacerbated the problem, rather than mitigating it. Rising prosperity and innovations in technology have led to more aggressive sex selection by parents, rather than a more moral approach to the issue of choosing to have only male progeny. On the part of the state, declining investments in the social sector have meant that social engineering in the form of creating a more evenly balanced society is almost entirely left in the hands of private enterprise. While noted economist and Nobel Prize winner, Amartya Sen, has found no correlation between factors like female literacy and sex ratio, this cannot be a reason for the state to abdicate its responsibility in areas like health and education. State investment in education has remained at 3 to 3.5 per cent of GDP in spite of recommendations made forty years ago that it should touch 6 per cent of GDP. According to the National Health Policy, public expenditure on health declined from 1.9 per cent of GDP in 1990 to 0.9 per cent in 1999.

It is true that, historically, the treatment of women in India has been a contentious issue. While on the one hand, women are supposed to have been given their due by getting their own seats in the parliament of the gods, many goddesses being important members of the Hindu pantheon, the ground reality is a dismal one, with the female of the species being disempowered and disenfranchised. Without a twofold effort by the state, first to curb the illegal practice of sex-selective abortion through strict implementation of the law, and secondly to create awareness and empowerment through higher investments in public spending, particularly for the girl child, the killing fields of India will continue to run with the blood of its daughters. In the absence of such measures, how can a remedy like female infant shelters help? Can it remove the message, writ large on society, that the female of the species is only worth being killed or abandoned?