South Asian Business news and information

Indians worship their female Goddesses and they also adore their Bollywood actresses and female supermodels. However, they are not fans of their baby daughters. In fact, many Indian couples consider the arrival of a baby daughter as nothing less than a great curse or disaster. So, thousands of couple kill the fetus of their (would be) baby daughters inside the womb. In fact, it has become a multi million dollar business in India and the doctors expert in this technology (of destroying fetus) are becoming rich. Well, everything has its price and the price in this case is that an imbalance has already happened in the sex ratio in India. According to the national census of 2001, it was seen that in India there were just 933 females against 1000 males.

Thanks to widespread killing of female fetus the number of females is only declining and you don’t have to be a specialist to understand the hazard of having fewer females in a society. It can create all sorts of social problems and it will sooner or later destroy the harmony of the society in India.

Indian government officials are always too busy to celebrate success in outsourcing and high economic growth. So, naturally, they have no time to think of petty matters like imbalance in gender ratio. Unfortunately, the condition has reached an alarming level and in some states, there are just a bit more than 800 females against 1000 males. So, some Indian officials will have to now stop celebrating and give some time and attention about this problem. So, Indian government has made a weird plan to tackle this problem. They are going to set up orphanages all over India for couples to abandon their daughters if they do not want to raise them anymore. Indian  Minister of State for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury has been personally looking after this matter and she is optimistic that it would help the Indian society.

Mangalorean.Com reported:

"We want to put a cradle or 'palna'  in every district headquarters. What we are saying to the people is have your children, don't kill them. And if you don't want a girl child, leave her to us," Minister of State for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury said in an interview.

"We will bring up the children. But don't kill them because there really is a crisis situation," she said.

The 'palna' scheme has been proposed to be put in place during the 11th Five Year Plan as part of a slew of measures to fight the menace of female foeticide.

Asked if the scheme would not encourage families to abandon their girl children, Chowdhury said "It doesn't matter. It is better than killing them."

She also said the parents, even if they were abandoning their daughters, were likely to have a change of heart later. "Parents who abandon children do come back and take them back," she said.

She said the government was treating the drop in sex ratio as an issue of national emergency and quoted the shocking figure of one crore as the number of girls who have been killed as foetuses in the country in the last two decades.

I find this scheme quite amusing. Indian government is going to waste quite a fortune for setting up the orphanages and then taking care of the girls. The funny part is that Indian government is not trying to address the root cause of the problem. We all know that couples are not interested to have female babies only for one reason- dowry system. The parents have to pay a lot of money as dowry to the family of the boy in a marriage ceremony. So, Indian government should declare an all out crusade against the dowry system. The government should order the media to broadcast programs against dowry.

If you look at the Indian TV serials and movies then you can find in each and every of them an expensive marriage ceremony. For this matter, the couples even feel more frustrated as they have to bear the wedding expense in the end.

If Indian government really wants to address the issue of imbalance in gender ratio then it must carry out a massive promotional activity against dowry in the media and stop the fancy marriages being shown in Bollywood movies and TV serials.

Do you agree with me?