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. Yamini MacLeanMay 31, 2022 at 2:14 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalMay 31, 2022 at 4:07 PM

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

      Delete
  2. Tomichan MatheikalJune 1, 2022 at 7:25 PM

    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
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
18 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 comments
Read more