AHMEDABAD, India, March 8 (UPI) -- It was a bad day for Doctor Harshad Thakkar when a well-dressed woman and her pregnant servant came to his office in the fast-growing state of Gujerat, India, this week.
Claiming that her servant already had a daughter, and an alcoholic husband who would beat her if the second baby failed to be a boy, the well-dressed woman, posing as a civil servant, asked for a sonogram to establish the sex of the fetus.
Thakkar performed the test and told the woman that it was indeed a boy. He was then paid 4,000 rupees (about $90) in marked banknotes, for the pregnant "servant" was in fact a nurse from the state health service, and the well-dressed woman was a detective. And the whole transaction, police said, was recorded on a spy camera.
Thakkar's two sonogram machines have been impounded and criminal charges filed, in the second such sting operation in Gujarat in six months.
"Gujarat has an alarmingly skewed sex ratio," said state health commissioner Amareet Singh. "While the 2001 census outs the ration at 883 girls per 1000 boys, birth registration figures are even lower, at 844 girls. Gujarats's most urban center, Ahmedabad, has just 818 girls per 1000 boys."
India is becoming deeply alarmed at the prospect of a future in which tens of millions of young males have no prospective female mate. But in traditional societies where custom prefers male to female children, the temptation to use the sonogram to establish the sex of a baby before birth is strong, The result, according to government statistics laid before India's Supreme Court in a landmark case, is the 'hidden genocide' of at least a million female fetuses a year.
The problem is getting worse. Although the government in 2001 ruled that sonograms could be sold only to properly registered medical clinics, the number of such clinics has soared from 600 to 30,000 in the last five years.
"Masculinization of the sex ratio at birth is no longer restricted to the northern states of Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, but has spread to the south and west where literacy rates are higher and fertility rates lower," notes Shabana Azmi, a famous actress who has become a social activist and member of parliament, as well as a campaigner against the deliberate abortion of female babies.
Asked why this is happening, Azni explains: "A relatively new conservatism, spearheaded by the religious and political right, has made matters worse for women."
There are other factors. India's new headlong pace of economic growth is drawing more women into the labor market, which tends to reduce the average number of children, and this in turn has meant more pressure to produce male heirs. The intense focus of India's rising middle classes on investing in education for their children in order to boost their future prospects has also been a factor in the preference for male babies.
But India's governments at both state and national levels are sobered by the long-term implications of this trend and are campaigning hard against it. Narendra Modi, chief minister of the state of Gujarat, has composed a poem, 'Song of the female fetus', in which the unborn girl appeals to her mother, woman to woman, from inside the womb to have her life spared so that he too can become a mother.
"It seems to be working," Modi told United Press International at his Gandhinagar home this week. "I go around the villages and chant my song, and the women burst into tears, and the result is that we seem to have stopped the terrible trend in the falling number of female births."
Female campaigners are now urging stronger measures on the government. They demand free female education up to the age of 18, and taxes to curb the dowry system, as ways to cut the costs to parents of a female child. Shabana Azmi also urges further use of the tax system to benefit females, and allowing women to register property at lower rates than males. "We need a political, cultural and economic assault on the exploitation of women," she said.
This imbalance in the sex ratios of babies has also become a major political issue in China in recent years, where thirty years of the one-child policy have left the country with a massive imbalance that will lead to an estimated 90 million young male without prospective female mates by the year 2020. As a result, the Beijing government has launched a drive to end female abortions, with a goal of getting back to an even male-female birth ratio by 2010.
Unless they can follow China with an all-out campaign against female abortion, India now faces the prospect of becoming the country with the largest number of girls being eliminated before they are born. And that in turn will mean social dislocation, sexual frustration, more prostitution and higher crime rates as young males lose the socialization that comes with marriage and children.
"We have to take this very seriously indeed," says chief minister Modi. "This is India's future at stake."
So is Dr. Thakkar's career, after the 'sting' operation against him. But any conviction may be in question. According to the detective who acted the role of the pregnant nurse's employer, she told Thakkar before the sonogram was performed that there would be no question of aborting the child, since she was prepared to adopt it. So the only charge he may face is for revealing the sex of a fetus, which has now been banned in India.
