Among the 132 mountainous villages that make up the Uttarkashi district of the Uttarakhand state in northern India, 216 children were born in the last three months. Not one of them was a baby girl, according to a district magistrate’s press conference last week, highlighting the rampant practice of sex-selective abortions in India.
A few days later, district officials backtracked on the initial numbers, saying that only 82 villages had concerning male to female ratios, and claimed that only 16 villages had no girl child births while the remaining 66 had fewer girls than boys.
Sex-selective abortions and infanticide in India are not new phenomena, but have increased rapidly since the 1980s, with ultrasound technology becoming more widely available. The country has recognized that there are 63 million girls and women missing from its population.
Traditional Indian culture views girls as a burden, both socially and economically. Jill McElya, the president and founder of Invisible Girl Project, said the practice of expensive dowries required to marry daughters is still prevalent across the country, despite being illegal. It is also cultural practice in India, a country with no social security system, for a son to take care of his parents in their old age. When a son marries, the new bride enters the man’s family and takes care of the parents.
“Two hundred and sixteen boys will grow into men, who will have no one to marry, because the girls have been systematically eliminated. What will these men do? What the families do not realize is that in effort to preserve their family lines by having sons, they are effectively working to bring their family names to extinction, when their sons will never marry,” McElya said. “They want to have a son because they want to be taken care of in their old age. So you have the burden of a female, and the incentives to have a son.”
[…]
