‘For compensation, MP mothers-to-be are left to die’

“It’s a case of a well-meaning scheme having gone haywire because of human nature,’’ Girija Vyas said at the end of a day-long conference today of chairpersons of state women commissions. She claimed a number of such cases had come to the notice of the NCW and the state Commission in Madhya Pradesh.

The Commission has already taken up this issue with the MP Government. “We have advised them to have mobile vans or ambulances available in rural areas so that women in labour can be taken to healthcare centres fast. The government should involve NGOs and panchayats in motivating families to go for safe childbirths.”

Vyas said in the light of the Madhya Pradesh experience, she had written to all Members of Parliament to provide for one ambulance each year in their constituencies from their MPLAD (MP’s Local Area Development) Fund so that women and old people have easy access to healthcare.

The women’s meet concluded that after female foeticide, the high MMR was the biggest challenge for women’s survival and steps needed to be taken to lower it.

Vyas said the survival of the girl child in the “Hindi heartland’’ had become all the more challenging due to advent of new technology, which enables doctors to determine the sex of the unborn child by testing a few drops of mother’s blood. ‘’How are we going to cope with this when in the entire country we have only three convictions under the Pre-Natal Diagnostics Technique (PNDT) Act?’’ she asked.

The meeting has asked the government to amend the Act and to galvanise the implementation machinery to make it more effective. “There is need for increasing the quantum of punishment and also to hold everyone — district administration, doctors, para-medics and parents — responsible for the gruesome act of female foeticide,” Vyas added.