Saving the girl child

What might cause a father to brutally murder his newborn child? Apparently, the fact that the child is female is reason enough in our country. That this aspiring superpower with its great “modern” cities remains medieval beneath the skin emerges in newspaper and television stories on an almost daily basis. The latest such story to make headlines is of the killing of a baby girl named Neha Afreen in Bengaluru.

Stories like this crop up every now and then. Sometimes it’s foeticide, sometimes it’s parents abandoning their girl, and sometimes it’s murder. Those of us who feel this is wrong voice our sorrow and protest. The evil, however, continues.

Around India, wherever the technology for gender determination of children before birth is easily available, gender ratios are badly skewed. Mumbai has the worst gender ratio in Maharashtra, for example. It may be coincidence, but that would be unlikely. The greater likelihood is that the law against sex determination is often broken, like the laws against bribery.

Mere policing will not solve this problem. Parents need to stop wanting to kill their girls, or they will do so by throttling if all else fails.

Perhaps the solution lies in economics. A big reason girls are unwelcome additions to the family is that it costs a lot to arrange their marriages and dowries.

Several cultures traditionally have the opposite practice: they have a bride price. Since wives are becoming harder to find than husbands because of skewed gender ratios, it would be only right if our societies reverse the dowry.