Letter from Rajasthan: India's Women Troubles

My two-year-old daughter is a girlie sort of girl: She has a head of curly blonde hair and her typical outfit consists of pink trousers, pink T-shirt with a sparkly pink ice cream motif, pink shoes with Velcro buckles styled as pink daisies, and a pink sun hat. She never goes anywhere without a pair of pink felt rabbits and a large pink plastic baby doll dressed in pink pajamas. Yet, somehow, during a recent family holiday in Rajasthan, she was repeatedly mistaken for a boy.

In the course of the usual tourist itinerary in India's most visited state — desert forts, camels and elephants, palaces perched in lake oases — she spent much of the time showing off, doing her best to attract as much attention as the monuments. When one young honeymoon couple asked how old my "son" was, I corrected them apologetically and mused that perhaps her wavy mop made her a little tomboyish. When an older couple asked the same question, I wondered whether to Indian eyes, we Caucasians all looked the same. But by the time the urbane receptionist at one of our accommodations asked how old "he" was, I was becoming a little indignant.

"He's a girl," I said. "I mean, she's a girl."

"I'm a big girl," added my daughter.

"Look at all the pink," I said.

"Peacock," said my daughter unhelpfully. "Bunny. Doggy."

"Oh," said the receptionist. "Sorry." Then she brightened: "Maybe a son next time."

Only later did I connect this with the fact that as well as being India's tourist jewel, Rajasthan also has one of the worst rates of female infanticide in India. Soon after I had arrived in New Delhi in spring 2002, I was horrified to read in my morning newspaper that flooding in a Rajasthani village had been traced to a drain behind a back-alley abortion clinic, which had been blocked with scores of discarded fetuses. Since then, I've become accustomed to tales of fatal, amateur late-term terminations and of doctors who make money on the side by breaking a law banning them from telling expectant couples the sex of their babies — and offering discreet abortions if the child is a girl. I've also heard the laments of young Indian men about the difficulties of finding a mate; one mainstream newspaper even argued that the upside of all this extermination is that the cost of dowries will come down due to the short supply of women. And now that my wife is pregnant again, I'm becoming accustomed to other mothers praying for a boy on our behalf. Our Rajasthan receptionist and fellow travelers, I now realize, were actually just being polite.

In several parts of India, the ratio between women and men is now so skewed that there are only 750 women to every 1,000 men. The nationwide average is 927 to 1,000; in a nation of more than a billion people, that translates to a shortfall of about 40 million women—the same as the entire population of Spain.

Worse, the ratio has actually been deteriorating. In 1991, the nationwide imbalance was 945 to 1,000. And India's growing prosperity, bringing access to ultrasound tests and safer abortions, is widening the gap. It gets below 740 in parts of Punjab, India's richest state. In the cities, which are generally more prosperous than the countryside, the average is 903 women to 1,000 men. A study by the Christian Medical Association carried out at hospitals in New Delhi found that after giving birth to one girl, half of all mothers will abort a second female fetus. The figure rises to 70% for families who have two girls. At the end of last year, a national study of 1.1 million families by Prabhat Jha of St. Michael's Hospital, University of Toronto, and Rajesh Kumar of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research, Chandigarh, "conservatively" estimated that around 500,000 babies are lost every year in India because of selective abortion. In an accompanying article in the medical journal The Lancet, Shirish Sheth of Breach Candy Hospital, Mumbai, described the practice as a the "female infanticide of the past refined and honed to a fine skill in this modern guise."

There are several reasons why Indians favor boys. Traditionally; the son and heir is the focus of an Indian family's pride, and the cost of a dowry for daughters—which can include a house for the newlyweds and cars, holidays and any number of TVs, DVD players and electric rice-cookers for the groom's family—can be excruciating. Dr. Sheth noted in The Lancet that because of the cost of dowry and weddings, daughters in India were a "liability." Also, there's a simple economic imperative: in what is still a fairly male-dominated society, boys earn more.

The traditional response to reports such as Jha and Kumar's is denial. India is a proud nation, where the country's historic image as a backward, disease-ridden backwater has long rankled. So just as the government has so far failed to do anything to aid India's growing population of HIV/AIDS sufferers—now the world's biggest—it has ignored female infanticide, despite the implication that in the last 20 years the nation has lost 10 million women. The Indian Medical Association has even said the Jha-Kumar report was out of date, and that the situation had improved in the last five years. That's not my experience. My wife went for an ultrasound this week. Despite a sign above his head saying he was forbidden from revealing the fetus' sex, the doctor told us. Happily, it's another girl.