In India, a terrible place to be born a girl

In India, a terrible place to be born a girl
By Amelia Gentleman
- Published: November 30, 2007
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/11/...s.php#end_main


MACHRIHWA, India: The birth of a boy in Machrihwa is celebrated with the purchase of sweetmeats, distributed with joy to fellow villagers.

The birth of a girl is, for the most part, not celebrated at all.

Women in this village are not eager to dwell on the subject, but many of those with daughters grudgingly admit that worse than the pain of childbirth was the misery of realizing that they had delivered a girl.

Juganti Prasad, 30, remembers the reproachful silence that settled over the room where she gave birth to her third daughter. Her mother-in-law handed her the child, and said curtly, "It's a girl, again," before leaving her.

"There was no one even to give me a glass of water," Prasad said. "No one bothered to look after me or feed me because it was a girl."

As she lay recovering, she could hear relatives in the next-door hut lamenting the calamity. A few weeks afterward, her husband threw her and their three daughters out of his home.

A five-hour drive along ill-maintained roads from Lucknow, the capital of the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, the surrounding district of Shravasti is, according to calculations by Unicef, the worst place in India to be born a girl.

Across large swaths of rural northern India, away from the rapid development that is tearing up traditional attitudes toward women in the cities, India's economic boom is virtually invisible and prospects for young girls remain highly restricted.

In November, India was ranked 114th out of 128 nations in a gender-gap survey conducted by the World Economic Forum, scoring poorly on equality in education, health and the economy. Unicef used three statistical parameters - the age at which girls are married off, the level of female literacy and the imbalance between the number of boys and girls - when it judged that there is no unluckier spot than Shravasti for a girl.

Nothing in the outward appearance of Machrihwa, in the north of Shravasti near the border with Nepal, hints at this dubious statistical triumph.

Wood smoke curls from beneath thatched roofs and girls sit with their mothers, sifting rice at the doorway to their mud huts in the peace that characterizes villages where no one owns a car. Families here scratch out an existence through agricultural subsistence, without the benefit of running water or electricity.

"We are dazzled by what is happening in the cities but there are these remote rural areas where development has not yet reached in any way," said Rekha Bezboruah, director of Ekatra, a women's rights organization based in Delhi.

The ambivalence that women here feel toward their daughters is rooted in the traditional Indian marriage system, which dictates, first, that girls leave the homes of their parents permanently on their wedding day for their new husband's family and, second, that they do so accompanied by a large dowry.

In private, the village women explain that the mothers' sense of resentment toward their newborn girls comes as the result of a hard financial calculation.

"The minimum is 25,000 rupees for dowry, which includes the price of a bicycle that you have to give to the groom and various ornaments. And then there's the cost of the wedding itself, another 20,000. Even when you look at the baby for the first time you have these thoughts," said Shanta Devi, 35, the mother of two girls and two boys.

The total of 45,000 rupees, equivalent to $1,150, is a backbreaking sum for landless laborers earning an irregular daily wage of around 30 rupees a day. "One likes to have a girl, but one also likes to have money," she added.

The practice of giving and receiving dowry in India is illegal under the Constitution. But successive governments here have had little success in implementing the law.

"Dowry is the key social evil for us," said Renuka Chowdhury, the minister for women and child development, in an interview. "The moment a woman has a daughter she feels she has let her family down."

Even in the cities the preference for sons remains powerful. A new culture of ostentatious consumption has pushed dowry prices up, further eroding enthusiasm among middle-class families for daughters.

In urban areas, the traditional bias has morphed into an efficient modern form, with the arrival of ultrasound technology that allows women to avoid giving birth to girls. Prenatal sex determination is illegal, but widely practiced. Across India, as many as 10 million female fetuses may have been aborted over the past 20 years, according to a study published in the British medical journal, the Lancet, last year.

"We have found female fetuses by the sackful, floating down drains," Chowdhury said.

In remote rural areas, a machine that can determine sex before birth remains an unheard-of luxury. Despite the reluctance of mothers here to give birth to girls, the ratio of girls to boys in this district is higher than in more prosperous areas of the India: 941 girls for every 1,000 boys at birth, higher than the national average of 927.

Here, it is the low literacy and the abnormally early age of marriage that drag Shravasti down to the country's worst place for girls, in Unicef's rankings, which were based on 2001 census data.

A few huts away from Shanta Devi, Santo, who goes by just one name, lives alone with her fifth daughter in a bare hut made of straw. The hut has no door and village dogs walk in and out. Inside there are no possessions except for a bed of knotted rope and a few clothes hanging from the ceiling. She too was cast out by her husband two weeks after the birth of the fifth girl.

Santo's third and fourth daughters died in early infancy of apparently curable illnesses - one of measles, the other of an undiagnosed fever. Neither child was taken to the doctor.

"I know my husband would have given me money to take them to hospital had they been boys," she said.

The local health worker, Hardayal Wishwakarma, based in a neighboring village, was not surprised. "If a girl falls ill, her parents don't bother so much with treatment. If a boy falls ill, then they will sell their house to treat him," he said.

Santo's two elder surviving daughters were married off when they were around seven years old, to relieve the family of the cost of feeding them.

"Marriage is seen as the best social security in these regions where there are no other options," Rama Subrahmanian, a social policy specialist with Unicef, said. Official figures put the average age at which girls were married here between 1996-2001 at 16.

Although government programs aiming for universal education are in place - girls and boys have the right to free education and are theoretically required to stay in school until the age of 14 - she said the problem was that they were often poorly implemented, particularly in India's more impoverished northern states.

On the walls of the village school, a painted image of a girl in pigtails sitting next to a boy astride an outsized red pencil, declares, "An educated woman is the light of the house." But the attendance roll tells a different story. While the number of girls and boys is almost even at the start, the girls swiftly drop out and their parents tend to stop sending them once they reach puberty.

The low female literacy here - 22.6 percent for girls aged between 15 and 24, a fraction of the national dual-gender average of 67.7 percent for the same age group - is also a reflection of a society that does not see the need to invest in its daughters.

The five worst districts to be born a girl in India are all located in northern rural areas, which are struggling economically, depend entirely on agriculture and lack basic infrastructure.

Change is slow, said Subrahmanian of Unicef.

"It is not possible for these places not to change. But the absorption into the mainstream is not happening fast."

Juganti Prasad said she would have had an abortion had she had access to a prenatal sex test.

"My husband used to get very angry and ask me 'What am I going to do with three daughters?' He even talked about selling them off," she said in the rural silence, as a tiny frog hopped across the mud floor of her hut.

"If my last child had been a boy, then the father would have provided for us," she said. "Now as it is, he doesn't care. It's so obvious: girls are a curse."