Urgent and sustained efforts needed to curb female foeticide were discussed at a two-day workshop on “female foeticide: rights of the girl child, problems and solutions,” held at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) here on Friday and Saturday. The workshop was organised to mark the National Girl Child Week from January 24 to 31. “The Sex Ratio in the country is decreasing at an alarming rate. The educated, upper classes,...

I remember being disturbed enough to stop watching the 2003 Hindi movie Matrubhumi(motherland). Set in the future, it depicted an Indian village populated only by men. It gets that way after a man, yearning for a boy, publicly drowns his newborn girl in a vat of milk, sparking a custom that wipes out women. So the men watch porn, fornicate with farm animals. A father marries his five sons to...

Girl child survival is skewedeven in those areas of northern India having limited access topublic health facilities and modern ultrasound technology asfamilies ''neglect'' them to ensure there are few survivors,says a new study. Since families can not know the sex of the foetus dueto lack of technology, girls born in these areas facesystematic healthcare neglect, specially in poorer communitiesto ''dispose them off'', says the study. Allowing the umbilical cord of the newly...

Farmana, a village in Haryana chief minister Bhupinder Singh Hooda's home district Rohtak, boasts of the cleanest toilets but its social indicators still reflect Haryana's feudal mindset. Its Sex Ratio is far below the state average. A Nirmal Gram awardee for "total sanitation programme", and also holder of the Adarsh Gram status, Farmana has a Sex Ratio of 648 girls to 1,000 boys — one of the low Sex Ratios in...

Haryana, reeling under a skewed Sex Ratio, is faced with yet another startling fact – an NGO has found that girls are being "bought" and brought to Haryana from 20 states across the country. The state's Sex Ratio stands at 837 in the 0-6 years age group, its lowest in the last five years and second only to Punjab. In one case, the family of a girl from Bihar was paid...