NewsLab

“Do you want a boy or a girl”? That’s a question women often hear during pregnancy in many countries. But if you put that question in India people may look at you in disbelief.
“Girls are a curse”, said a mother of three daughters in a poor village in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh to an International Herald Tribune reporter who recently visited the region that UNICEF describes as the worst place in India to be born a girl.
The economic “boom” India registered during the last decade wasn’t enough to solve the huge gap between men and women in society. According to a recent study published by the World Economic Forum (WEF), India is in the 114th place of a 128 country’s list in gender equality.
And UNICEF, using three parameters (age of marriage, literacy, and imbalance between the number of boys and girls), concluded that the situation is worse in Shravasti district, near the Nepalese border, were the birth of a girl is seen as a punishment. Here, women are married by the age of 16 (some even younger), only two in ten are sent to school, and many are ostracized by their parents.
The problem, the newspaper says, lies on the traditional marriage system, “witch dictates, first, that a girl should leave her parents permanently on her wedding day and, second, that she does so accompanied by a large dowry”. The gifts for the groom and the wedding itself can cost more than 45 thousand rupees in a country where poor farmers don’t earn more than 30 rupees a day! Then, when a woman gives birth to a girl, instead of a boy, feels she has let her family down and the newborn is received with resentment.
Although the Indian Constitution forbids the dowry, the governments seemed incapable of implementing the law, and even in the urban areas the tradition is still followed. The ultrasounds technology allows women in the cities to find out if they are expecting a boy or a girl, which led to a record of female fetuses being aborted over the past years.
In Shravasti women don’t have access to that kind of technology, so when they give birth to a girl they risk being dumped by their husbands! And if a girl falls sick, probably her parents won’t take her to a hospital, so dozens died each year of perfectly curable diseases…