It was a jail sentence long overdue in the battle to save India’s ”missing girls,” say women’s rights activists.
Twelve years after the country enacted laws to curb the killing of female feotuses, an Indian judge handed out the first prison terms against two medical practitioners this week.
”It’s shocking it has taken this long,” said Ranjana Kumari, who sits on a government body monitoring the 1994 law’s implementation. ”But it’s very difficult to collect evidence as neither parents who have gone for sex tests nor doctors who lust for the money will speak out about it.”
Dr Anil Sabhani and his assistant were sentenced to two years jail and ordered to pay 5 000-rupee ($113) fines on Tuesday.
They were filmed in a sting operation by government doctors in 2001 identifying the sex of a foetus as female and assuring the patient ”it would be taken care of”.
”The convicts do not deserve any leniency. It is due to the illegal acts of persons like the convicts that the sex ratio is declining day by day,” the judge said.
India has had a history of female infanticide — of girls suffocated, poisoned, drowned or left to die. But now abortion of female foetuses, or ”female foeticide,” has become easy with ultrasound tests costing as little as 500 rupees. Mobile sex-selection clinics mean the tests can be performed even in the remotest village.
Activists say the time the first case has taken highlights the legal difficulties in enforcing the law in India’s already clogged judicial system.
In addition, despite public campaigns aiming to change the perception of girls as liabilities, parents’ hunger for boys over girls has tilted the sex balance.
A recent study by the British medical journal Lancet estimated sex selection claimed up to half a million female children each year and five million since the practice was banned in 1994. The data was disputed by the Indian Medical Association and many doctors who said the number was nearer to 250 000 a year.
In any event, the 2001 census showed 927 girl babies born for every 1 000 boys. In some parts, the child sex ratio was around 750 girls to 1 000 boys. The average globally is 1 050 female babies.
The only other conviction since the 1994 Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act was in the northern state of Punjab in 2003 when a doctor was fined 1 000 rupees for disclosing the identity of the foetus, Indian media reported.
The doctor sentenced on Tuesday was caught when a team of government doctors sent three decoy patients to his clinic in the town of Palwal, south of the Indian capital New Delhi.
”There’s a limit to the number of sting operations you can do,” said Kumari, director of the New Delhi-based Centre for Social Research. ”I think there’s a serious lack of commitment on the part of law enforcement to nab people.”
”It’s not as if those in government are not also party to these things — it’s not as if police officers and bureaucrats don’t take their wives for sex selection tests,” added Madu Keshwar, editor of the feminist magazine Manushi.
Doctors use sign language — thumbs up for a boy, thumbs down for a girl — or say things such as ”your child will be like a doll” to circumvent the ban on revealing the child’s sex, according to women’s rights workers.
”Sex selection is a high-volume, low-risk business,” said Puneet Bedi, a New Delhi foetal medicine specialist, calling prenatal selection — including abortions — a major industry.
Fuelling the desire for boys are often crippling dowry costs for marrying off daughters, prompting parents to view abortion as a cheaper option to weddings.
Traditionally, boys are expected to look after aging parents while girls typically move away to husbands’ homes. And there is a belief that a son lighting his parents’ funeral pyre will ensure their souls go to heaven.
”Your sons are your main social security” in a country with no social security, said Keshwar.
Already, however, some areas are seeing what is termed a ”marriage squeeze” in which men — instead of getting dowries — are buying brides, a trend social activists say will only worsen unless the attitude towards girls changes. – AFP