Authorities in a northern India state launched an investigation this week to uncover why no girls were born in 132 villages in three months. The reasons for the skewered sex ratio are widely known but there’s little will to tackle the problem.
Four years ago, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched a nationwide campaign called “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao,” -- Save the Daughter, Educate the Daughter -- to much fanfare in the historic northern Indian city of Panipat. Flanked by a Bollywood actress, female ministers and a posse of national notables, Modi made an emotional call to end India’s entrenched, lethal gender discrimination.
But the message -- televised, tweeted and broadcast across the world’s second-most populous country -- was not heard in a neighbouring state, which recently recorded an all-time low for gender birth equality in India.
Over the past three months, not a single girl was born in 132 villages in the northern Indian state of Uttrakhand, according to local authorities. An investigation was launched over the weekend after official data revealed that of the 216 children born in 132 villages in the Uttarkashi district, not one was female, according to Asian News International (ANI). In 16 of the 132 villages, now marked as a “red zone”, no female births were recorded over the past six months.
Quantifying India’s skewered gender ratio is a depressing business and it keeps getting worse. The 2011 Census found the world’s largest democracy had 919 female children for every 1,000 male children, down from 927 in 2001.
The country’s preference for boys results in fewer female births due to sex selective abortions as well as excessive female deaths due to neglect or maltreatment. Together, they account for what statisticians call women “missing” from national populations. In 2017-2018, the Indian economic survey found 63 million Indian women were “missing” and an additional 21 million were “unwanted", resulting in lower nutritional and education levels.
‘Technical’ solutions to societal problems
Successive Indian governments have attempted to address the problem, passing legislation and launching headline-grabbing national awareness campaigns. A 1994 act banning prenatal sex determination tests forbids health providers -- including laboratories and clinics -- from disclosing the sex of the fetus to a pregnant women and her relatives. The act has been amended to keep up with technological advances, adding acronyms along the way, and is currently called the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, also known as the PC & PNDT Act.
The act is a key tool in Modi’s latest Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (BBBP) campaign, with the prime minister’s official website promising to increase the “enforcement of PC & PNDT Act” as well as implement “nation-wide awareness and advocacy” campaigns.
While the legislative and executive measures are necessary and welcome, activists warn that they fail to address the root of the problem.
“The problem is these laws are trying to deal with societal conditions in a technical way. What has to change is the value of a woman and the girl child, and these are deeply enmeshed with societal customs,” said Kalpana Sharma, a veteran journalist and author who has extensively covered women’s rights issues in India.
Missing girls and women in space programmes
When it comes to the status and value of women, India presents a landscape of striking contradictions. The Uttarkashi zero girl birthrate investigation, for instance, came as India launched its second moon mission, led by two women -- Muthaya Vanitha, the project director, and Ritu Karidhal, the mission director -- this week.
The dichotomy between millions of “missing” females on the one hand and high-achieving women breaking the glass ceiling in various fields on the other is often explained in purely class and geographic terms: poorly educated, impoverished, rural Indian women are faring worse than their urban, more educated and affluent sisters.
But while broadly true, the analysis overlooks the pervasiveness of patriarchal traditions such as the dowry system in a predominantly Hindu society that transcend class lines to erode the value of women.
Bridal families enrich grooms’ kin
In theory, dowry is outlawed in India, but in reality the practice is widely prevalent, adapting and adjusting to rising income levels, urbanisation and a growing middle class. Modernisation has merely revamped the practice of dowry, with household appliances and vehicles replacing the gold jewellery of yore.
While wedding costs in India are customarily borne by the bride’s family, rising consumerism has sparked increasingly lavish, long-drawn-out ceremonies. Media coverage of extravagant ceremonies hosted by a growing section of “super-rich” adds aspirational pressure on bridal families struggling to cope with wedding costs.
The economics of traditional Indian marriages then are brutally simple: the family of the bride enriches the family of the groom. In low income and caste groups this means the family of the groom can impoverish the bride’s family. And that, experts say, accounts for India’s entrenched preference for sons and declining value of women.
“The dowry that must be paid to marry off a daughter encourages parents to prefer sons, because in this case, they do not pay for the weddings and instead receive dowries and gifts,” explained Bénédicte Manier, a journalist and author of “Made in India”. “These dowry-related transactions are worth billions of rupees each year in India, it’s an economy by itself, growing with a new middle class. Not surprisingly, this social category, which has high dowry rates, also has the highest birth sex selection rates.”
‘Love jihads’ but no ‘choice jihad’
Rising social mobility has had little impact on the institution of marriage in India, a conservatism that has survived migrations as well as increasing female literacy and employment rates. Arranged marriages account for an estimated 90 percent of Indian marriages, almost all of them within societally prescribed caste and community groups. The lack of choice is largely unquestioned and enthusiastically promoted in popular culture such as films and TV series.
“Marriage is still endogamous within the clan and community and the value of a girl is equal to the wealth she brings into the marital household,” explained Sharma. “Even the so-called modern generation has no option for making choices without facing enormous opposition.”
The dark consequences of exercising individual choice when choosing life partners frequently make the news in India. Earlier this month, for instance, the daughter of a politician from the ruling BJP party posted videos on social media pleading for police protection since her father was threatening her after she married a lower caste Dalit man.
“The clash between a so-called modernity and a deep conservatism is getting more and more embedded with the dominant politics reinforcing conservatism,” said Sharma, referring to the Hindu rightwing policies of Modi’s government.
The prime minister is clearly invested in improving the status of women and increasing their economic contributions. But critics say Modi has done little to protect women from patriarchal practices promoting by the religious orthodoxy and conservative Hindus who form his voter base.
In a country where marriages are overwhelmingly endogamous and individual agency has no bearing on the choice of a life partner, rumours and fake news reports of cross-community marriages can be dangerous.
Modi has been reluctant to speak out against “love jihad,” a term coined by Hindu extremists who claim India’s minority Muslim community is engaged in a conspiracy to convert Hindu women to Islam.
Extremist Hindu religious groups, a core Modi voter base, have incited a number of lynching cases against Muslims in recent years. Women in conservative societies are often the firmest upholders of patriarchy and in many “love jihad” cases, women have led some of the most virulent attacks.
A skewered sex ratio, far from increasing the value of a woman’s life, puts her at graver risk, say experts. Manier explains that it sparks a “strong disruption of the marriage market” resulting in “many men struggling to find women of their age”. This, she warns, results in high celibacy rates in some areas. “In the long term, some 30 million men will remain without a wife. This situation also leads to trafficking of young women from poor families. Some are even bought by several men who "share" or sell them several times in a row.”
In some of the worst affected northern Indian states, the practice of buying and selling wives is so prevalent that vulnerable women are resigned to the fact that they will be sold on to a next husband after delivering a son.
Far from “bachaoing” -- or saving -- women, India is failing its women by ratcheting up the rhetoric on tackling its skewered sex ratio problem while failing to deal with its real causes.
