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An alarming decline

This year, on International Women's Day, the Government reiterated its commitment to halt the alarming and continuous decline in the country's sex ratio and announced several measures to reverse the trend. Currently the national figure stands at 933 women to 1000 men, but what is most disturbing is that the number of girls per 1000 boys in the 0-6 age group has fallen from 945 in the 1991 census to 927 in the latest census. The primary factor responsible for this unhealthy phenomenon is of course the low value ascribed to women in Indian society. Consequently, many families prefer not to give birth to girls or do not nurture girls adequately. Not giving birth to girls is marked in many regions across the country by what the Nobel prize winning economist, Amartya Sen, calls "high-tech sexism" — determining a foetus's sex and aborting the foetus if it happened to be a female. Inadequate nurturing results from giving girls a subordinate claim over the family's food, educational and medical care resources compared with boys. Professor Sen has called attention to the "remarkable geographical split" of India. If the German ratio of 94.8 to 100 can be used as "the cut-off point below which we should suspect anti-female intervention," India splits itself into "two nearly contiguous halves" with respect to the 0-6 sex ratio. The entire North and West are below the benchmark and the whole East and South (with the exception of Tamil Nadu) are above it. The worsening sex ratio in economically prosperous States like Punjab, Haryana, Maharashtra, and Gujarat demonstrates that the explanation for anti-female bias must look beyond economic prosperity or GNP growth.

The Government's initial step to rectify the declining sex ratio was the passing of the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PNDT) Act of 1994, by which all clinics with ultra sound machines were required to register themselves and performing a sex-determination test was made a cognisable, non-bailable offence, punishable with a jail term and a fine. Unfortunately, enforcement of this law has been extremely poor; clinics still advertise for the tests with impunity and there have hardly been any successful prosecutions. The Government has now announced its intention to establish a national monitoring cell, sensitise the local authorities and the medical community, and to review the implementation of the PNDT Act. Notwithstanding this, more action is required to strike at the root of the problem: the centuries-old notions that perceive women as less valuable members of society than men, which ironically many mothers accept unquestioningly. Women must be encouraged to reconsider this paradigm and must be protected when they do so; this entails measures to prevent the abuse of women that may follow from their free enquiry into traditional values. That in turn will happen only if the government gives a higher priority to correcting the sex ratio imbalance, for which those in charge must themselves be disabused of gender-biased notions.

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