Female Foeticide

Female foeticide accounts for half a million less female births in India.

In a village, Nai Majra, the ratio of girl to boy children in 0-1 age group is 437:1000.

In the 0-6 age group, a study done of 477 villages, in 16 of those villages, the ratio was 500:1000.

The villages were in the Punjab, in the relatively prosperous Doaba belt.

Foeticide is performed after a sex determination test.
Punjab has a long history of aborting and often even killing new born girl children. Polyandry is often accepted because of a shortage of women. Women are shared between brothers. The burying of the girl child is often done more by land owning zamindars than common folk.

The Hindu code bill that gave equal inheritance rights to women and men, lead to more girl children being killed to protect landholdings, and keep them within the family. The female to male ratio is lowest in Punjab, compared to the whole country.

In 2003, the worst offenders were Punjab 776, Himachal Pradesh 803, Haryana 807, Uttar Pradesh 853 and Rajasthan at 855:1000. In the same year the best ratios were in Tamil Nadu 953, Karnataka 943 and West Bengal 937. In the whole of India in 2001 it was 927 and in 2003 it dropped to 883.

A lancet study estimates that more than 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted in India, in the last two decades.

I summarized the above from a very disturbing article that I read in an Indian news magazine, outlookindia.com.

The degradation and humiliation of women starts in the womb and continues through her life.