HOW HARYANA SAVED ITS GIRLS
The relentless campaign by the Khattar government against female foeticide has paid off
ON FEBRUARY 3, DOCTORS in the emergency room at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak were horrified to receive a profusely bleeding young woman unaccompanied by relatives or attendants. She had evidently undergone an ‘induced abortion’ at a highly advanced stage of pregnancy. “She has a ruptured uterus and diaphragm, causing the large intestine to protrude into the vagina,” the attending surgeon in the emergency room said, alerting chief medical officer (CMO) Sanjay Dahiya.
Acting with alacrity, a team of police and health officials, despite the scanty information, managed to track down the victim’s mother-in-law and brother-in-law in Karoon, a village in the neighbouring Jind district. In less than a week, the other culprits were arrested—the owner of the private clinic where the abortion was carried out and the nurse who did it. Police recovered the remains of the aborted female foetus from fields outside Jind’s Chaudhary Ranbir Singh University.
The Jind case, which is in the process of being committed to a court trial, is the most recent in what has been a concerted crackdown by the Manohar Lal Khattar government to lay down the law against female foeticide. Consider this: since Prime Minister Narendra Modi selected Panipat to launch the Centre’s Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) programme on January 22, 2015, the Khattar government has registered 584 first information reports (FIRs) under provisions of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PC-PNDT) Act and The Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act. That’s more than the total cases registered in all the other states during the period. Over 1,000 suspected offenders, who include doctors, nurses, quacks, touts, godmen and even patients and their family members, have been arrested and booked.
A three-member BBBP secretariat set up in May 2015 and connected with each of Haryana’s 21 districts has run a relentless campaign under the chief minister’s watch. Pregnant mothers, usually young constables or health workers, were deployed as decoys to bust scores of illegal ultrasound centres, including many operating in private hospitals.
Girdhari Lal Singal, coordinator of the BBBP project in the chief minister’s office, describes “numerous cases where paramed-
ics and doctors, operating through a network of touts, were hoodwinking gullible customers by simulating ultrasound examinations using mobile phones hooked to computer monitors”. In many instances, he says, families aborted what they were wrongly told were female foetuses.
Like in June 2015, when a police constable, Seema Devi, and a colleague posing as her sister-in-law exposed a fake ultrasound centre in a private clinic owned by Anant Ram, a Hisar doctor who has contested the state assembly elections three times. Subsequent investigations led to the arrest of Ram and more than a dozen people, including a woman who had aborted her baby based on the clinic’s questionable report.
Besides ultrasound centres, decoys, often equipped with hidden cameras, have been used to expose other illegal ‘gender-selection services’. These include IVF (in-vitro fertilisation) centres, sex detection kits sold online and quacks and godmen promising male children through homemade ‘elixirs’. Rakesh Gupta, additional principal secretary to Khattar, says, “Convictions aren’t easy as there is rarely a complainant.” Still, authorities have registered some 60 FIRs against individuals purveying ‘sex selection drugs’ and gender detection kits.
Singal recalls an ayurveda practitioner in Rohtak who would charge Rs 1,000 per dose for his ‘medicine’ guaranteeing a male offspring. A priest in Yamunanagar purveying similar stuff for Rs 5,500 was also arrested. Gupta says studies commissioned by the state government in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Public Health show that women taking such drugs often delivered prematurely or gave birth to babies with congenital defects.
The sustained crackdown on ultrasound centres, Singal says, seems to have driven people to gender selection via IVF. In 2015, the nodal officer for the PC-PNDT Act in Pa-
nipat found women had opted for IVF at a private hospital to bear sons. According to Singal, IVF centres have proliferated in the past 2-3 years. “There are more than 30 in Gurugram alone,” he adds.
Khattar received a complaint against one such, rather posh, facility in Gurugram in February. Preliminary investigations have revealed that, aware of the legal complications in India, this centre has been arranging to fly couples to Dubai for what its website advertises as ‘family balancing’ through selective IVF. The chief minister’s campaign against female foeticide depends on tip-offs received from the public. “Informers are rewarded Rs 1 lakh and their identities are kept a secret,” says Gupta. It’s evidently working. In 2017, some Rs 43 lakh was disbursed as rewards for tip-offs.
Gupta says “effective enforcement” has brought the rampant sex selective abortions in Haryana down to a trickle. The fear of arrest and prosecution has also led to an exponential increase in the cost of illegal gender selection. Viresh Bhushan, the Chief Medical Officer at Sirsa, says ultrasounds for sex determination in Haryana now cost Rs 50,000 against
Rs 5,000-10,000 in neighbouring Uttar Pradesh.
So wouldn’t that quite simply drive the ‘boy business’ beyond state lines? Perhaps, but Singal says Haryana officials have been conducting raids in Uttar Pradesh, Delhi, Punjab, Uttarakhand and Rajasthan and have filed more than 130 FIRs. In December 2017, a team tailed a number of expectant mothers from Haryana to a farmhouse in Ahmedgarh in Punjab, where sex determination ultrasounds were “cheap and easily available”. The centre was raided and several people, including Malkiat Singh, a doctor and owner of the farmhouse, were arrested.
Three-and-a-half years since the BBBP campaign was first launched, Haryana’s sex ratio at birth (SRB) , which was down to a miserable 834 (that is 834 girls for every 1,000 boys) and was the lowest among all states in 2011, jumped to an impressive 914 in 2017. Seventeen districts reported SRBs above 900. Only four— Jind, Rewari, Rohtak and Narnaul—had SRBs around 890. “SRB targets have now been reset to 950,” says Gupta.
But the Khattar government’s BBBP campaign has also drawn criticism for being enforcement-centric. Singal concedes the bigger challenge will be to change the patriarchal mindsets that give social sanction to female foeticide. A mindset change is being attempted by celebrating women achievers—late astronaut Kalpana Chawla, sports stars Sakshi Malik, Geeta Phogat and Rani Rampal, Lieutenant Commander Sandhya Chauhan, who led the naval contingent at this year’s Republic Day parade, and Miss World 2017 Manushi Chillar, to name a few.
Deputy commissioners have been empowered to initiate programmes to discourage sex selection. In Sirsa, the village reporting the best SRB every month is rewarded Rs 75,000. Under the Meri Laado scheme, a woman who bears a girl child receives a congratulatory letter, an engraved nameplate with the baby’s name, a gift and an information brochure detailing all the central and state government benefits available to the family. Based on the SRB of 871 in 2014, the BBBP campaign has, since its launch, saved the lives of an estimated 11,600 girl children in Haryana— arguably the Khattar government’s biggest success.