Waiting in the Wings

According to the 2011 Census,released in January this year,Mehsana town has the sorry distinction of having the lowest child sex ratio the ratio of girls to boys in the 0-6 age group among urban centres in India. With only 845 girls per 1,000 boys in the 0-6 year age group,its a blight on the township where the literacy rate is 90 per cent. Abortion clinics and technology have made female foeticide easier,with enough doctors and families willing to sidestep the law.

The proclivity for the male child is not limited only to the poorer sections of the society. For 36-year old schoolteacher Kena Patel,from an upper middle-class family,shock gave way to indignation when she was forced to abort a girl child. I gave into the pressure from my in-laws and opted for an abortion,all the while trying for a male child. I was shocked but I did not want my husband to desert me, she says.

The PC-PNDT Act Pre-conception and Pre Natal Diagnostic Techniques Prohibition of Sex selection passed by the Parliament came into effect in 1994 for regulation and prevention of misuse of diagnostic techniques. Its implementation was expected to rein in pre-natal sex determination and elimination of the female foetus,but things have not worked out to expectation. When ultrasound technology first came to Gujarat in the 1990s,it took people some time to warm up to it. But the question of morality was quickly sidestepped and its benefits churned by a community set on the boy child. Geeta Shroff,who runs ANIS,an NGO in Surat,says family pressure leads to the maximum cases of abortion. We play a mediator role in cases where women are being victimised for giving birth to a girl child and counsel families, she says.

Mehsana district collector Rajkumar Beniwal says the problem is deep-seated. Its a social problem,so we keep meeting community leaders and encourage mass marriages that can take the pressure off dowry in the community. On the executive side,we have been tracking the mandatory Form F that every pregnant woman has to fill out. We check for any discrepancy in data. From these forms,which we receive by the fifth of every month from all clinics and hospitals in Mehsana,our team has found that almost 700 women in the district had their pregnancies terminated in the last year. Our team will be going out and meeting them to ascertain which doctors helped them have their abortion. We are also looking at employing a software to track if sex determination has happened during sonography. Its voluntary for a clinic to have the tracker but we will be watching the doctors closely, he says. Beniwal has also initiated feel-good measures. Every family which has a daughter gets a letter of appreciation that enlists all the government initiatives for the childs future that the family can avail. Its a start, he says.

Rather surprisingly,Mehsana also has a daughters club,where families with up to two daughters are admitted. Started in 2006,the club now has 125 members. We only allow families with have two daughters. In Mehsana when you have three daughters and a son,you know that there was pressure on the mother to produce a son. We organise rallies,fund female education and exchange our stories of struggle. Now,there are similar clubs in Maharashtra,Jharkhand and Haryana, says Neeta Vyas,club president,and mother of two daughters.

But Mehsana alone does not contribute to Gujarats skewed child sex ratio. Despite its economic and industrial proficiency,the state ranks 27th in India in its bias against the girl child,among 28 states and seven union territory. In the decade since the last census in 2001,when the child sex ratio was 883 per 1,000 boys,there has only been a marginal improvement to 886 per 1,000 boys in 2011.

Surat,for instance,threw up figures of 836 girls per 1000 boys in the 0-6 yrs category in this Census,pushing its health department officials into stringent action. Raids on sonography clinics and laboratories resulted in the suspension of licenses of 129 clinics and hospitals in different talukas of the district in the last year. District panchayat chief health officer,RK Kanchal says,It is difficult to catch doctors redhanded. We raid hospitals and clinics periodically and talk to the patients and junior staff to detect illegal sex determination tests.

No matter how much you love your daughters,it isnt easy. Even after four years of the birth of my second child,I have to explain why we are not trying for a child again. Its a never ending trauma. You are made to realise that something is missing from your life, says Rajkot-based Pooja Gohel,who has two daughters. The Gohel household has three daughters between Pooja and her sister-in-law Mansi. But sometimes,the burden is made easier with the familys support. I dont know if my daughters will miss having a brother in their lives when they grow up. But I am sure I wanted two children and I have them already, says Poojas husband Kalpesh.

Some names have been changed to protect identity

With inputs from Hiral Dave