Gender bender

There are two broad critiques of this law. One, that it sets out to 8216;control8217; people, provides the state with the mandate to interfere in what is essentially a private matter and imposes a certain morality on individuals. It also makes individuals responsible for a social good like a more equal sex ratio. Two, there is also the argument, first posited by economist Dharma Kumar in her essay, 8216;Male Utopias or Nightmares?8217; EPW, 1983, that the law of supply and demand can sort out the problem, so why resort to bans. If the supply of women gets reduced because of sex selection, they will only become more valuable.

To the first argument, one can only say that society has often had to choose between competing rights and social goods 8212; in this case the right/need of an individual to choose the sex of his or her child is pitted against society8217;s right/need to have more equal sex ratios 8212; while legislating on various issues. Consequently, in the light of certain socially desirable goals, the state would have to favour one right/ good over another. Almost every law or regulation is evolved after making such determinations. To take a facile example, the right of a motorist to arrive at a destination as quickly as possible has to contend with traffic signals which place restrictions on the movement of all commuters for public safety. As for Dharma Kumar8217;s argument, the 8216;market8217; for daughters has not got any more bullish despite the millions of missing daughters. Supply-and-demand laws do not work in complex social scenarios. In any case, as Satish Balram Agnihotri has argued, brides and grooms are not undifferentiated products in an unsegmented market. Brides can be imported, as indeed they are, often leading to extremely unhappy and unequal circumstances.

However, having said this, it also needs to be acknowledged that the PCPNDT Act has not met with significant success, a fact graphically illustrated by the data provided by the minister of state for health, P. Lakshmi, in Parliament last month. While acknowledging that the sex ratio in the age group 0-6 in the 2001 census was 927 per 1000 boys, as compared to the 1991 figure of 945 girls, she went on to state that 402 cases had been filed under the PCPNDT Act. Of these, 140 were for non-registration of ultrasound clinics, 135 for non-maintenance of records, 61, for communication of sex of the foetus, 36 for advertising such services, and 30 for violations of the act. The minister did not specify the rate of conviction, but it is so low as to be almost insignificant. Dr Baljit Singh Dahiya, a former director-general of health services in Haryana, did succeed in getting a doctor and his assistant jailed under the PCPNDT Act, but even he acknowledges that lack of proper monitoring and implementation are major loopholes in the act and believes that profiling pregnancies and births at the local level is the only way to fight female foeticide.

There can be no denying the link between proliferating ultra-sound facilities and declining sex ratios. Pune8217;s Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics mapped the correlation and found that the average sex ratio for districts in Maharashtra with more than 100 sonography centres was 901, while those with fewer centres had a ratio of 937. Thanks to the great persistence and efforts of anti-sexing activists, detailed regulations governing the use of sex determination technology are now there on paper. Clinics are required to maintain records, and an 8216;appropriate authority8217; is required to inspect them regularly. The idea is to make a low-risk, high-profit venture into a high-risk, low -profit one.

But legal instruments are inherently limited. They do not by themselves immediately effect changes in attitudes and beliefs, neither do they address the deeply felt need for male children within Indian society. Additionally, laws lag behind rapid advances in medical technology. Today, 8216;emergency contraceptive pills8217; are being advertised on television. Tomorrow, there could be a product that allows a woman to learn the sex of the foetus through a simple urine test, who knows? Where does that leave the present monitoring and regulatory regime?

This suggests that there is no escape from the long, hard grind of making women more equal within Indian society. Coercion, by its very nature, is limited and will be increasingly less effective as medical technologies evolve. The coercive, therefore, needs to get translated into the consensual. In fact, even in places where declining sex ratios have been checked today, as in some pockets of Haryana and Punjab, the legal recourse was just one of many social initiatives that focused on raising the profile of daughters. We still need the regulatory systems without doubt, given the scale of the problem, but just one film like Chak de India, which destroyed in the course of three hours the perception that 8220;londiyan belan ghumati hain8221; girls are meant to wield rolling pins, can potentially do more for the country8217;s sex ratio than interminable meetings of 8216;appropriate authorities8217;.