Female Infanticide becoming rampant in Punjab

(Excerpts from a report in Outlook Magazine, JUST AS published in a website)

Punjab's crackdown on sex determination clinics and doctors performing female foeticide has had an unexpected and horrific result: an alarming increase in the incidence of female infanticide.

In recent weeks, there have been several cases of newborn girls being found abandoned in garbage dumps, parks, fields and canals.

In an attempt to stem the sudden spurt in female infanticide, the SGPC has decided to place cradles outside major gurdwaras for people to leave unwanted baby girls. In a similar response, the Amritsar district administration has placed a cradle outside Red Cross Bhavan, where newborn girls can be left without any questions being asked.

Punjab's long tradition of female infanticide dates back to the days when families killed their girls to prevent them from being carried off by invading armies. Common methods of killing babies include feeding her milk poisoned with the sap of aak (a commonly-found plant), stuffing a cotton ball in her throat, giving her a strong dose of opium.

December 27: Sushma gave birth to a healthy baby girl at a Bhatinda hospital. It was the couple's third girl child. The next morning, theinfant was found dead with blue marks around her nose and cheeks, leading to suspicions that she had been suffocated. The local police have registered a case.

December 19: The headless body of a three-day-old baby girl was found at Urban Estate in Jalandhar. Stray dogs had eaten much of her head and shoulders before passersby noticed and informed the police.

December 16: The body of a newborn baby girl was found on a pile of garbage in Akali Market in Amritsar. Stray dogs were fighting over her body all wrapped in a polythene sheet before people shooed them away.

October 23: A baby girl, just three hours after she was born, was found abandoned in a field near the Verka area in Amritsar. She was not even wrapped in a cloth and the rough stubble in the field had cut into her flesh when a passerby found the baby crying her lungs out.

One would have thought Punjab's crackdown on female foeticide would spell the end of the gory practice. But as the long, sad list on the left indicates, it has assumed even more sinister proportions: there has been an alarming increase in incidences of abandoned baby girls dead or alive being found across the state.

So acute is the problem that the Shiromani Gurdwara Prabandhak Committee (SGPC), the apex body controlling all Sikh shrines in Punjab, has been constrained to declare that it will place cradles at the entrances of important gurdwaras in the state so that parents obsessed with boys could "leave these innocent babies at the door of God, and not death".

SGPC president Avtar Singh Makkar told Outlook , "Do not kill children. We will bear the expense for bringing them up. Last month, we established theMata Gujri Bal Sambhal Kendra at Fatehgarh Sahib for this purpose.
The spurt in cases of baby girls being found in public parks, railway compartments and garbage heaps is a blot on Punjab.

"Though clampdowns by the government machinery on ultrasonography clinics and doctors involved in determining the sex of foetuses have been on for several years now, the first official acknowledgment of the growing newmenace of female infanticide has come from the Amritsar district administration. Just a couple of weeks ago, it put up a cradle at the District Red Cross Bhavan to enable people to leave their unwanted baby girls there. And on the first day itself, a woman from nearby Waryamvillage came to leave her third daughter in the cradle.

What is happening is shameful, and shows our utter disrespect for human life and dignity.

Our Solutions:

1) Continue with cradle programme. State should bear the responsibility

2) Activate adoption agencies

3) If still a girl child gets killed, stringent punishment to those who encourage such acts. Panchayats should be encouraged to report all pregnancies and the outcome.

4) Awarness campaign about the role of a daughter in a family is must.

5) Protection of women must be top most priority

6) Dowry abolition. SGPC recent dictate on simple marriages

7) Free education for girl child should be given and tax benefits to parents of two girls.