Skip to main content

Gender discrimination in the womb

One of the many mothers and daughters in India discarded by families because the woman gave birth to a girl child. 


7000 girls are killed in their mothers’ wombs every day in India, according to various estimates. 63 million women were never born in India because of this phenomenon of female foeticide.

Killing the girl in the mother’s womb became common in India from the time the technology for sex determination of foetuses arrived. In this country of Himalayan paradoxes, women get odes composed to their gloriousness on the one hand, and they are driven to the worst possible edges of survival on the other. In which country will you find so many goddesses? And that too fire-spitting goddesses like Kali and graceful killers like Durga! There is so much empowerment of women in India’s divine milieu. Why is the story on the ground just the reverse? Why is there so much discrimination against women in the country?

“India is the only large country where more girls die than boys,” says a recent UNICEF report. Slogans like Beti Bachao Beti Padhao had already made enough noise in the Indian political air before the international report arrived. India has around 900 girls for every 1000 boys. UNICEF goes on to say that globally 7% more boys die under the age of 5 while in India 11% more girls die in that age group. In India, girl children are killed. Even before they are born.

Why? The question arises again.

The obvious answer is that boys have all the fun in India except in that 2-wheeler ad. Boys inherit all the family legacy including the family name in India. Only males can perform the funeral rites of parents. And no parent wants to be deprived of the eternal pie awaiting them after all the earthly gallivanting is over. In addition, there is also the quintessentially patriarchal conviction that women are meant to be nothing more than mothers and caretakers at home.

Even the government at the centre which regularly keeps mouthing good-sounding slogans upholding the daughter doesn’t seem to be serious about its intentions. Two of Modi’s most publicised schemes for girl children have achieved little by way of output.

One is Sukanya Samriddhi Yojana (2015). It demands an annual investment of Rs 1.5 lakh from the parents of the girl child for 15 years. Thus the parents will invest Rs 22.5 lakh over a period of 15 years and then the government will return Rs 43.5 lakh at the end of the 15 years. The families that require governmental assistance in this regard can’t ever think of putting aside that sort of amounts for one child. In fact, instead of making the parents think of the girl child as a blessing, this scheme ends up reinforcing the notion that the girl child is a burden for whom the family has to put aside most of their savings.

The second scheme is Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (2015). This was precisely meant to prevent female foeticide. But it turned out to be futile because of the red tape involved. Every application in this scheme has to be processed and approved by three different ministries: the Ministry of Women and Child Development, the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, and the Ministry of Human Resources Development. Another case of maximum government and minimum governance.

Are there no solutions really to this problem of brutal massacre of innocent children even before their birth? South Korea had a similar problem. Apart from enforcing the laws against foeticide, they took meaningful measures to promote women’s welfare. They encouraged and provided opportunities for women to enter the labour force. Women are no longer mere caretakers at home. They are as valuable citizens as their male counterparts. South Korea also employed the media to get support in its efforts to bring women to the forefront instead of using the media for hollow propaganda. Consequently, the entire attitude to women underwent a national metamorphosis.

India needs that sort of a mental metamorphosis. It needs to redeem itself from its obsession with the past and its glories and focus on the present and its concerns. In the meanwhile, you and I as individuals can do our bit of modifying our own attitudes towards the issue (and other issues as well).

PS. This post is part of Blogchatter’s CauseAChatter.

Comments

  1. Hari OM
    A serious question and good reasoning... reaching the culprits to alter their minds and attitudes is the greater challenge. Just like the gun quesition in the USA... YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Whenever I take up the Blogchatter causes, I automatically become serious.

      Delete
  2. And that's the real challenge. Only individuals can take up the challenge. After all, there is nothing called a national brain.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

Our gods must have died laughing

A friend forwarded a video clip this morning. It is an extract from a speech that celebrated Malayalam movie actor Sreenivasan delivered years ago. In the year 1984, Sreenivasan decided to marry the woman he was in love with. But his career in movies had just started and so he hadn’t made much money. Knowing his financial condition, another actor, Innocent, gave him Rs 400. Innocent wasn’t doing well either in the profession. “Alice’s bangle,” Innocent said. He had pawned or sold his wife’s bangle to get that amount for his friend. Then Sreenivasan went to Mammootty, who eventually became Malayalam’s superstar, to request for help. Mammootty gave him Rs 2000. Citing the goodness of the two men, Sreenivasan said that the wedding necklace ( mangalsutra ) he put ceremoniously around the neck of his Hindu wife was funded by a Christian (Innocent) and a Muslim (Mammootty). “What does religion matter?” Sreenivasan asks in the video. “You either refuse to believe in any or believe in a...