Female Genocide in India By Jalil Ahmed

India worships a score of goddesses seeking “shakti” (divine power}. The divine mother Durga and the Great Mother - Kali Ma are worshipped across the country by both male and female for strength.

However the hypocrisy of Indian society is pellucid as on one hand it worships women goddesses and on the other it doesn’t hesitate to kill these goddesses’ vivid manifestations.

Some ten million female births in India have been lost to abortion and sex selection over the past 20 years because of a traditional preference for boys.

The shocking report, published in the British Medical Journal, Lancet lays the blame squarely on the use of ultrasound screening, which tells families whether their child will be a boy or a girl.

The research, based on a national survey of more than one million households, found an unusual gender imbalance in the country, the study said adding the gender imbalance in India has been known for some time. It has caused a marriage crisis in rural areas where thousands of young men are failing to find brides.

The research, carried out by Prabhat Jha of St Michael's Hospital at the University of Toronto, Canada, and Rajesh Kumar of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Research in Chandigarh, was published in the Lancet journal (Jan 2006).

They said prenatal selection and selective abortion caused the loss of 500,000 girls a year.

The research based on a national survey of 1.1 million households in 1998 claimed the "girl deficit" was more common among educated families irrespective of religions. The study found an alarming tendency to select boys when previous births were girls.

Prabhat Jha concluded conservative estimates suggest half a million girls were being lost each year. The practice has been common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound became widespread, hence the figure of 10 million missing female births does not sound “unreasonable”, he added.

In most countries, women slightly outnumber men whereas research for the year 2001 showed that for every 1,000 male babies born in India, there were only 933 girls.

Traditionally female children are held inferior and a liability across the sub-continent .The region, a large agrarian society, considers boys more useful for farm work. ###