Female Infanticide
The Problem
The oleander plant yields a pleasant flower,but also a milky sap that, if ingested, can be deadly poison. It's one of the methods families use to kill newborn girls. Although the government has battled the practice fo decades, India's gender imbalance has worsened in recent years:
- There was national decline from 945 to 927 in the number of girls per 1,000 boys aged 0-6 between 1991 and 2001;
- In some parts of the country the ratio has declined to fewer than 800 girls per 1,000 boys.
- In the nearly 300 poor hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu [state], as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances [in 1993] ... Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death. (Dahlburg, "Where killing baby girls 'is no big sin'," The Los Angeles Times [in The Toronto Star, February 28, 1994.]) (Usilampatti is one of the areas Relief Projects India, in collaboration with the Claretian Education and Social Services Society, is targeting for the village outreach Programme. It is just a few kilometres from the Mercy Home for abandoned babies.)
- A report by Palash Kumar published on Dec. 15, 2006 says India Has Killed 10 Million Girls in 20 Years. The report says “Ten million girls have been killed by their parents in India in the past 20 years, either before they were born or immediately after, a government minister said on Thursday, describing it as a "national crisis".
- Punjab loses every fourth girl. By the 2011 census, we would be killing off 10 lakh (1,000,000) girls a year. (Stop Murdering The Girl Child, Tribune, Correspondent or Reporter, Sep 26, 2007)
- It is not that female babies are less frequently conceived or more susceptible to disease, but rather that they are killed upon birth, or in some cases not born at all.
Why females
According to CBC News writer Jeremy Copeland, a proverb “Raising a girl is like watering the neighbour’s garden” generally sums up the way girls in India are seen - as an economic burden on their parents. Parents about to marry off their daughters in India usually have to pay for the wedding and give a large dowry to the groom’s family. Though formally outlawed, the practice of dowry is still pervasive in Indian society. This can run ridiculously beyond ones means as an average civil servant earns about 100,000 rupees a year (US$3,500) while the combination of dowry and wedding expenses usually add up to more than a million rupees (US$35,000) - Porras, “Female Infanticide and Foeticide”.
