India’s millions of missing women

IT HAS recently been reported that, over the past three months, in an area of northern India covering 132 villages, government data showed 216 babies were born. Anything remarkable about that? Absolutely not. More or less what one might have expected.

Sorry, I should have mentioned one minor detail – all the babies were boys, every single one of them. A remarkable coincidence? Hardly.

An investigation into suspected “sex-selective” abortions in this particular area of India has been launched by local government authorities. Although India outlawed the selective abortion of female foetuses in 1994, the practice remains commonplace in the country, where parents tend to see boys as future breadwinners, whereas girls are seen as costly liabilities.

“Any parents found to have committed female foeticide will face legal action,” said the local district magistrate. Too little too late, I would have thought. Last year an Indian government report found that about 63 million women were statistically “missing” from the country’s population due to a preference for male children.

These appalling statistics raise a number of questions.

At a time when the Indian government has embarked upon a programme of space exploration, some might be asking themselves whether this is the kind of thing to be concentrating their resources on when an estimated 40% of India’s children are malnourished.

Further, India has an arsenal of nuclear weapons at its disposal. For what, in heaven’s name?

Nuclear weapons? Get rid of them, on both sides; and use the resources thus released to alleviate poverty so parents do not feel the need to abort their female babies because they fear they can’t afford to have them.

There is also a question for campaigners for human rights for women. What do they make of the fact that 63 million of India’s women appear to have gone “missing”? What happened to them? And what happened to the human rights of those missing women? Tony Young Llangennech, Llanelli