The girl child in India

The girl child in India.

Am going to start this by talking about a personal experience while traveling from Howrah to Guwahati by train sometime in the early 1990s. Our neighbours in the train bogey included a man traveling to TeenSukhia in Meghalaya with his wife, son and daughter. The son was perhaps 11 or 12 at that time,, his sister maybe two years older. The boy quickly made a complete nuisance of himself. As the train passed through New Jalpaiguri and Siliguri, vendors came aboard selling every kind of trinket, portable electronic goody imaginable. And this kid wanted everything. His dad tried hard enough to satisfy him. The girl, on the other hand spent all the time staring out of the window. Later, in conversation with them, we found out that the boy was just two classes junior to me. And that his elder sister did not attend school. I remember being shocked almost witless by that piece of information. Her parents did not see the point in educating a girl.

A couple of days, I read newsreports of some 35 female fetuses being found near a quack’s clinic somewhere in Punjab. That, in gentle reader is the curse of the Indian girl. The oldest continuous civilization in the world, one that prides itself on its humanity does not care about its girls. Do not get me wrong here, the government does its level best. I have studied in Kendriya Vidyalayas where girls do not have to pay any tuition fees. In fact, in remote places, the state administration tries to send social workers to convince village people to send their daughters to school and gives them all kinds of incentives like mid-day meals and so on. But what do you expect when its is ingrained into the minds of people that girls are only destined to be wives and mothers, so why bother to teach them anything?

Dowry. The curse that has been plaguing us for we do not know how long. Along with dowry, we had another beautiful practice called ‘Sati’. This meant that a young widow would be burnt alive on the funeral pyre of her dead husband. Sati was abolished due to the efforts of Raja RamMohan Ray, who founded the Brahmo Samaj in Calcutta. Dowry remain a problem to this day. According to our laws, demanding and giving dowry is a criminal offence. But who is listening? One might imagine that with education, such practices would die a natural death. It so happens that dowry is much more prevalent amongst the urban educated rich than in lower classes. And although young women today are free to pursue any career that they want to, at the time of marriage, it is still expected that they pay a dowry.


This and other reasons are why girl children are viewed as a burden by parents. Hence, prenatal sex determination (which is, by the way, illegal in India). Hence, termination of female fetuses. Hence, a declining gender ratio. Hence interesting social practices come to the forefront again. Such as a woman marrying into a family of four brothers, and being a wife to all of them. This is seen in some of our ‘Bimaru’ states. (Bimaru stands for Bihar, Madhyay Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, the most heavily populated, most undereducated states).

It is simply not enough to say that the government is not doing its bit. As long as we Indians sit around condoning such practices, they will continue.