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Seven
Indian states offer families cash to stop abortion of girl
fetuses
India has launched a dramatic initiative
to stop the widespread practice of poor families aborting
female foetuses by offering cash incentives for them to give
birth to the girls and then bring them up.
 Families
can expect to earn around £1,500 per girl under a government
scheme announced this week.
In many parts of India, especially in remote and rural areas,
male babies have long been the preferred child of expectant
parents. Such is the perceived cost of marrying off a daughter
and the contrasting anticipated benefits of having a male
child that millions of daughters are often killed before they
are born.
The most recent national census suggests the country's gender
ratio is 933 females to 1,000 males but in some villages in
states such as Uttar Pradesh, the difference is far greater.
A recent study published in The Lancet medical journal estimated
that around 10 million female foetuses may have been aborted
in India over the past 20 years. The new government scheme
is designed to end such practices.
"We will pay the money in stages and monitor how they
are brought up," India's Women and Child Development
Minister, Renuka Chowdhury, told reporters in Delhi this week.
In India, daughters have long been discriminated against for
cultural and financial reasons, with families comparing the
estimated income a male breadwinner might earn compared to
that of a woman. Added to that is a woman's dowry cost that
remains part of the marriage tradition in many parts of the
country.
The practice has grown with the ease of access to electronic
sex determination tests that are routinely made available
to expectant couples in the West. Such is the scale of the
problem that for more than a decade, the practice of pre-natal
sex determination - with a handful of exceptions - has been
banned for more than a decade.
And yet such tests and the subsequent abortions of female
foetuses continue, even in India's largest urban areas. Last
year a doctor in Gurgaon, the hi-tech satellite city adjoining
Delhi, was arrested after admitting to aborting more than
250 such foetuses over the past 10 years.
The scheme announced by the Indian authorities will carry
a number of requirements if families are to receive the money.
The lump sum will be paid once the daughter reaches the age
of 18 and can prove that she has been to school. Her nutrition
and health will also be checked and for the family to receive
the money, the young woman must not be married.
The project will be trialled in the seven states where girls
face the worst discrimination - Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh,
Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.
Mrs Chowdhury said: "This will force families to look
upon the girl as an asset rather than a liability and will
certainly help us save the girl child."
She added she was confident the policy would give a new impetus
to changing attitudes. The government is also promoting awareness
of women's rights.
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