Busted sex-determination camp blows lid off larger social crime
Four-hundred metres off the Agra-Mumbai national highway (NH3), and 800 metres away from the Banmore police station, is an unpaved road leading to a threeroom house that has a large desert cooler jutting out from one of its windows. The locality in Jaitpur Road in Madhya Pradesh’s Morena district is nondescript — single-floor houses located on sparse plots, with cows ambling on dusty streets. Right in the middle is the home with the cooler, owned by 35-year-old taxi driver Lakhan Singh Gurjar. In one corner is a 10x10 square foot room. Its rickety wooden beds have no mattress. There are two entrances, the first through a worn-out wooden door, the other covered only by a torn curtain.
There is little reason for the rent for this house to be ₹15,000 — 10 times the market rate. Except that a joint investigation by Haryana and Madhya Pradesh — in which a pregnant woman acted as a police mole — revealed that this location was the venue of a clandestine sex determination camp where agents brought women secretively from multiple states.
On March 3, the Madhya Pradesh police arrested two agents, 32-year-old Narendra Singh and 24-year-old Sachin Kumar, while two others are on the run. “Four people have been booked in the case. The two arrested men worked as agents and drivers. The kingpin is 32-year-old Dheeraj Shriwas, who was found involved in a sex determination case in 2020, and has been absconding since then. We have invoked the stringent National Security Act against him. The other man on the run is Lakhan Gurjar, who owned the house,” said Morena’s superintendent of police Ashutosh Bagri.
India has struggled with female foeticide for decades, intertwined with issues such as men being seen as productive members of a household and a culture of wedding dowry, which was made illegal in 1961. These fault lines were exacerbated in the mid-1970s, when techniques such as sonography arrived in India. “In 1961, the Census pegged the sex ratio at 976 females per 1,000 males. But between 1974 and 1975, sonography machines emerged and this deepened the crisis. In 1981, the sex ratio declined to 934, falling even further to 927 in 1991,” said Madhya Pradesh women and child development joint director Suresh Tomar.
A 2019 report, “Gender Issues” by the Union ministry of health and family welfare concurred. “Sex determination techniques have been in use in India since 1975, primarily for the determination of genetic abnormalities. However, these techniques were widely misused to determine the sex of the foetus and subsequent elimination, if the foetus is found to be a female. Easy availability of the sex determination tests and abortion services has proved to be a strong catalyst in the deteriorating demographic imbalance.”
It was to combat this that, in 1994, the Union government passed the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques — PC&PNDT (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994, strengthening it with an amendment in February 2003. The amendment brought “techniques of pre-conception sex selection” under its ambit, including the misuse of ultrasound machines to disclose the sex of the foetus.
The last two Census surveys brought a measure of course correction, with the sex ratio improving to 933 females per thousand males in 2001 and to 943 in 2011. But in several corners of the hinterland, there is still evidence of organised gangs that game the system, feed on the desire to ensure a male child, determine the sex of the foetus, and fuel female infanticide.
The latest incident is of one such multi-state operation that brings into the spotlight a stillprevalent practice in parts of India.
The operation
In early February, 271km away from Banmore, the Faridabad district medical team received a tip that preparations were underway for several pregnant women to be taken to Morena for a sex-determination camp. Led by Maan Singh, the district Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostics Techniques (PCPNDT) Act nodal officer, an eight-member team began looking for ways to crack the case.
Aware that these camps are run behind a veil of secrecy, and that its perpetrators could flee at the slightest hint of being caught, Singh knew they had to come up with something inventive. Police concluded that they had to send in a pregnant woman who could lead them to the location of the house. “Most women, even some from our staff, refused. They were afraid of the consequences, and scared by the idea that the camp was being held in Chambal, a name that strikes fear because of its history of dacoits. For a month, we came up empty. But, eventually, did we find one woman from Jhajjhar who was willing,” Maan Singh said.
The woman is 24, the wife of a Jhajjhar-based farmer, and is three-and-a-half months pregnant with her first child. “The woman and her husband first approached the agent of the sex determination ring through a middleman who was our informer. We cannot share how we convinced the woman. But after she agreed to help, for two weeks, we gave her some rudimentary training on how to stay calm, and what to say. She was also told what to do if the agents suspected her of working with us,” Maan Singh said.
Police fixed a GPS device in the 26-year-old’s saree, and on March 3, began tracking her movements. “The woman and her husband were first taken in a vehicle arranged by the accused to Dholpur in Rajasthan. The agent, Narendra, then asked the husband to stay in Dholpur (on the Madhya Pradesh-Rajasthan border), and told him his wife would return in a few hours. We tracked the GPS location, but lost it for a couple of hours. When we eventually raided the place, the woman and all of those that were with the agents had left, but we were able to arrest two people,” Maan Singh said.
Senior Madhya Pradesh police officials said interrogations revealed that Narendra picked up the woman and her husband from Jhajjhar and drove to Dholpur, where 14 other women were waiting. There, they changed vehicles from a van to an SUV and drove to Banmore in Morena, 26km away. “Each woman was frisked to see if they were carrying cellphones,” a senior Madhya Pradesh officer said, asking not to be named.
In her account to the police, the woman said that each of the other 14 women there had different stories that they exchanged — one already had three daughters so wanted a male child, a few others were victims of harassment from their families who wanted a boy and nothing else. “But they were all cagey about their names, identities and addresses. This is how they had been instructed to be by the criminals,” the senior officer added.
Modus operandi
Investigators said that the sexdetermination gang has at least eight members, besides a network of agents that works in multiple north Indian states such as Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. These “agents” were trained to keep an eye out in district hospitals, often using amenable Asha workers to find families to target. “The agents themselves got between eight to ten thousand rupees per camp where they brought vulnerable women. Once a family was contacted, a deal between ₹40,000 to ₹50,000 was fixed for sex determination,” a second senior police officer said.
Inside the room in Banmore, the wooden bed served as a hospital bed where Dheeraj Shriwas conducted the ultrasound tests. As one woman lay down, the others stood and watched. He used a small portable ultrasound machine, (Chinese-made, police said) that could fit into a small briefcase. “These machines can be bought for anywhere between ₹3 lakh to ₹5 lakh on the black market. They are portable and can be carried around easily. The advent of this technology has meant the threat of more such camps being organised,” said health expert KK Dixit, who has worked in the field for 15 years in Madhya Pradesh.
At the end of the day on March 4, Shriwas said the two dreaded words to four women. “Hatana padega”(it will have to be removed), he said. To 10 others, he said, “Wahi hai jo chahiye”(the child is the kind you want).
Investigators said that they have zeroed in on a doctor who was in touch with the gang, and carried out abortions at his medical facility. “He would admit these women alleging that the abortion was required because of a medical complication in the pregnancy. We are not naming him because we are still building a case against him,” said case investigating officer Sapna Jain.
Shriwas, police said, once worked as a paramedic in a private hospital in Madhya Pradesh and has been running such rackets for at least three years. “The gang has a nexus in different states and this is at least the second camp in the past four months. We have also found the involvement of a man named Saurabh Sharma who is absconding in a PCPNDT Act case since 2020. Asha workers are also involved, and more arrests will follow,” said Jain.
According to Morena PCPNDT nodal officer, Dr Giriraj Gupta, a raid was carried out at a similar sex determination centre in Sanjay Colony, Morena, about two years ago. “That centre was run by Rekha Sengar, a nurse from a private hospital, and Shriwas. Police registered a case under Section 315 (act done with intent to prevent child being born alive or to cause it to die after birth) of the Indian Penal Code. Shriwas has been absconding since then,” said Gupta.
Why Morena is a hot spot
Experts said that the Chambal region of Madhya Pradesh has long been an area where foeticide is rampant. In the 2011 Census, Morena had the lowest sex ratio in the state at 829 females per 1,000 males. It was among 100 districts in India that were asked to improve on this aspect by the Union ministry of women and child development in January 2015 under the “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” scheme.
On the ground in Banmore, HT found that there was a quiet sense of support for the practice. Kaumesh Gurjar, who lives next door from the one-room house said, “We were told that the room was taken on rent to run a self-help group for women. How does it matter if they were checking the sex of the child? They were not involved in foeticide. Why has Lakhan been targeted?”
Standing next to him, Rabhudi Khan, another neighbour, said, “The women would all come of their own volition. They did not seem poor or harassed.”
According to Dixit , the people in this region suffer from a lack of awareness that it is illegal to carry out such practices. “There are villages here where foeticide is rampant. Things have improved a little and infanticide may have stopped, but people do not believe there is anything wrong with foeticide,” he added.
Morena district collector Ankit Asthana said that they were looking to fix accountability for the existence of such camps. “I have asked all the block medical officers (BMO) to keep a watch on such camps and improve our informer network. If they need more money, we will provide it.”
Dixit also pointed to a lack of action by the state government under the PCPNDT Act. According to data from the Madhya Pradesh health department, since 1994, over 11,008 ultrasound centres have been inspected, and action has been taken against 299. Since 2022, action was taken against two centres while 1,099 were inspected. There was no inspection that was carried out in Morena, Madhya Pradesh health department data says.
MP health minister Prabhuram Chaudhary, however, said, “I don’t know a great deal about women from other states coming to Madhya Pradesh for such tests but we have improved a great deal, especially Chambal. National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 5 data shows that the sex ratio has increased to 964.”