Four wasington times articles about India - please comment - OrissaTodayNetwork - A HindToday.com network member | Google Groups: By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published February 26, 2007
*First of four parts.*
"Raising a daughter is like watering your neighbor's garden." -- Punjabi saying
PAONTA SAHIB, India -- By early afternoon, wedding festivities were well under way for Gagandeep Singh, 29, and Taranjeet Kaur, 26, in this touristy town in the Himalayan foothills of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.
Mr. Singh, the groom, works at an American Express office near New Delhi. He is seated cross-legged in a large, gracious white Sikh temple overlooking the Nagar River. His ceremonial finery includes a dagger and ornate turban.
Beside him is his bride, her hands heavily hennaed with designs befitting a newly married woman. She is dressed in a magenta-colored gown and spends much of the ceremony gazing down at the floor. Nestled beside her like a flock of bright birds are female relatives dressed in brilliant jewel-colored tunics known as salwar kameez.
In front of the couple are Sikh priests. They alternately pray, sprinkle holy water on the crowd and instruct the couple to circle around a low-lying altar as a trio of musicians tap out rhythms on tabla drums and a harmonium.
Later, back at the wedding hall, the bride's father, Amarjit Singh, reveals he has given a refrigerator, TV, washing machine, clothes and a DVD player to the family of the groom.
"This is not dowry," he protests, "these are just gifts the father likes to give for his daughter."
Miss Kaur is his only daughter and later that evening, she sits in her family's living room as guest after guest shoves stacks of rupees into her purse. Eventually, a car pulls up containing the groom's family. Wailing and clutching her parents for the last time, she slowly marches toward the waiting car that will bear her 30 miles southward to Yamunanagar, the city where her new husband's family lives.
"Indian brides handle these partings with great theatrics, often wailing uncontrollably," observed American journalist Elisabeth Bumiller in her 1990 book on the trials of Indian women, "May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons."
"I decided this was the only rational response, given what was in store for many of them," she said.
*More boys than girls*
India is facing a shortage of women like Miss Kaur.
In most places in the world, a mother can find out the sex of her unborn child, but in India, it's illegal to do so. That is because if she's a female, there is a good chance she will never be born.
Roughly 6.7 million abortions occur yearly in India, but aborted girls outnumber boys by 500,000 -- or 10 million over the past two decades -- creating a huge imbalance between males and females in the world's largest democracy.
Ratios of men to women are being altered at an unprecedented rate in India and neighboring China, two countries which account for 40 percent of the world's population.
According to UNICEF, India produces 25 million babies a year. China produces 17 million. Together, these are one-third of the world's babies, so how their women choose to regulate births affects the globe.
Female infanticide -- whereby tiny girls were either poisoned, buried alive or strangled -- has existed for thousands of years in India. But its boy-to-girl ratio didn't begin to widen precipitously until the advent of the ultrasound, or sonogram, machine in the 1970s, enabling a woman to tell the sex of her child by the fourth month of her pregnancy.
That coupled with the legalization of abortion in 1971 made it possible to dispose of an unwanted girl without the neighbors even knowing the mother was pregnant. In 2001, 927 girls were born for every 1,000 boys, significantly below the natural birth rate of about 952 girls for every 1,000 boys.
In many regions, however, this imbalance has reached alarming levels and it continues to grow. In 2004, the New Delhi-based magazine Outlook reported, sex ratios in the capital had plummeted to 818 girls for every 1,000 boys, and in 2005 they had slipped to 814.
The issue is highly sensitive for the Indian government, which had given the nation's sex imbalance scant attention until this month.
"It is a matter of international and national shame for us that India, with [economic] growth of 9 percent still kills its daughters," Renuka Chowdhury, the Cabinet-level minister of state for women and child development told the Press Trust of India news agency in an interview that was widely published in the national press.
Mrs. Chowdhury announced plans to set up a nationwide network of orphanages where women can drop off unwanted daughters with no questions asked.
"We will bring up the children. But don't kill them because there really is a crisis situation," she says.
Yet the practice of "female feticide" is so widespread and deeply ingrained in the nation's psyche, scholars and activists fear that even the most vigorous attempts to combat it would require a lifetime or longer to restore nature's balance.
"There has always been a deficit of women: Infanticide, neglect or they're left to die if they are sick, but technology has accentuated it,"
says Prem Chowdhry, a New Delhi-based scholar and specialist on male-female relations in India. "The volume has grown. Culturally, these things are not new, but now they're taking a new shape."
Early this year, the British medical journal Lancet estimated the male-female gap at 43 million. Worldwide, Lancet said, there are 100 million "missing girls" who should have been born but were not. Fifty million of them would have been Chinese and 43 million would have been Indian. The rest would have been born in Afghanistan, South Korea, Pakistan and Nepal.
China gave an even bleaker assessment last month, with the government saying that its men will outnumber women in the year 2020 by 300 million.
One Geneva-based research center, in a 2005 update on the phenomenon, termed it "the slaughter of Eve."
"What we're seeing now is genocide," says Sabu George, a New Delhi-based activist. "We will soon exceed China in losing 1 million girls a year."
The date may already be here. In a report released Dec. 12, UNICEF said India is "missing" 7,000 girls a day or 2.5 million a year.
Although India has passed laws forbidding sex-specific abortions, legions of compliant doctors and lax government officials involved in India's $100 million sex-selection industry have made sure they are rarely enforced.
Several companies, notably General Electric Corp., have profited hugely from India's love affair with the ultrasound machine.
As a result, a new class of wifeless men are scouring eastern India, Bangladesh and Nepal for available women. India, already a world leader in sex trafficking, is absorbing a new trade in girls kidnapped or sold from their homes and shipped across the country.
As sex-specific abortions increase, the destabilizing effects on Indian society are bound to greatly impact a country with expanding economic and strategic ties to the United States.
India's estimated $23 billion defense budget relies on military hardware from U.S. corporations, and the U.S. Congress voted in November to permit the sale of nuclear technology to the country.
In September, The Washington Times sent a reporter and photographer to spend three weeks in different parts of India chronicling this problem. They asked: What are the cultural reasons for this genocide? Why is the government allowing it? Who is fighting against it and what steps can be taken to stop it?
*Dowry deaths*
Sister Mary Scaria was one of two girls in a family of nine children. Dressed in an aqua-colored sari of the Sisters of Charity of Jesus and Mary, the nun is also a lawyer and coordinator of the Delhi Catholic Archdiocese's Justice & Peace Commission. In early 2006, she published "Woman: An Endangered Species?" which charged that "female feticide" is decimating half of the population.
She chiefly blames the dowry system, a Hindu marriage practice by which the groom's family demands enormous sums of money and goods from the bride's family as a condition for letting their son marry her.
"At a wedding, everyone looks to see how many bracelets the bride has and how much gold she has," the nun says. Dowries typically consist of gold and appliances, as well as substantial amounts of cash. Defenders of the system say that girls are often denied an inheritance in India; thus, what she gets at her wedding is in effect a savings account she can retain for
the rest of her life.
What actually happens is the groom's family pockets the dowry, the nun explains, and the payments don't stop there.
"When a wife has a baby in India, the wife's family has to pay for the hospital stay," Sister Mary says. "After the birth, they also have to bring gold and food for the new family, even new saris for all the relatives."
Some Indian castes even require that the bride's family pay her funeral expenses when she dies. Worse yet, the groom's family will often kill the bride in what's known as a "dowry death" if they think the dowry is too small.
Many families therefore elect to not have a girl at all. Medical clinics -- which Sister Mary calls "womb raiders" -- have advertised "better 500 rupees now [for an abortion] rather than 50,000 rupees later" [for a dowry].
The first amount is about $11; the second is $1,100.
Dowries are theoretically banned under the 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act, but enforcement is poor and other religious groups such as Muslims and Christians have been caught up in the custom.
Sister Mary says that if she were to get married, her Catholic family would have to pay up.
A Sept. 29 article in the Times of India front-paged its account of a Muslim family in New Delhi that dumped a new daughter-in-law within 24 hours after the wedding because the dowry was not big enough.
The groom said he wanted about $4,400 more "as well as a Pulsar [motor] bike," the bride told the newspaper.
*Caste causes*
It's a sultry evening and Ms. Chowdhry, dressed in an olive green salwar kameez, orange pants and gold bracelets, is reflecting on why the life of an Indian woman can be so miserable.
"First," says the New Delhi-based scholar, "girls can get killed for a number of reasons, including anything that brings dishonor. A girl can be killed before she is born. If she survives, she is forcibly married. If there's not enough dowry, she is killed."
She cites the Indian state of Haryana, just north of New Delhi, which has the country's second highest per capita income. It also has India's second worst sex ratio, after Punjab state to the west. For every 1,000 boys born in Haryana, just 820 girls were born, according to the 2001 census. In 1991, it was 879 girls.
Punjab is similarly wealthy; thus, instead of the poor killing their children, it's the rich, says Ms. Chowdhry, a former senior fellow at the Nehru Memorial Institute and Library.
"Punjab and Haryana are the two highest per capita income states, but they have such regressive trends," she says. "How can they call themselves modern?"
India's caste system "is very basic to violence against women," she says. It is based on Hinduism, which teaches one's behavior in this life determines which caste one will be born into for the next life. Individuals are expected to marry within their caste.
Thus, the shortage of girls is a "huge problem" to men in Haryana and Punjab who wish to observe caste practices.
"In Haryana, 36 percent of the men between 15-45 are unmarried," she says. "In one district, it's 40 percent. Men who do not get married get more vicious."
Richer men will be able to get themselves wives; what's troubling to Ms. Chowdhry are the poorer men who are importing brides from India's poor eastern regions.
"These women are extensively sexually exploited," she says. "They do all the housework, manual and field work. Some of these women, once they are used by a man, they are passed on to another."
Pregnant women wishing to avoid having daughters who might suffer such a fate are desperate to find doctors who will tell them the sex of their children.
"Mobile vans have advertisements on them that a doctor is available,"
Ms. Chowdhry says. "They are innocuous, but everyone knows what's inside."
*Sikh radiologist*
The city of Yamunanagar, population 300,000 located 130 miles north of New Delhi, is encircled by wheat and sugar cane fields, bisected by the Yamuna River and dotted with herds of black water buffalo.
The area north of New Delhi has the country's most severe shortages of
girls. In Yamunanagar alone, there are 30 doctors who will illegally abort a female child at the request of the parents, says Dr. Tajinder P. Singh, 45, a local radiologist.
He refuses to tell pregnant women the sex of their offspring after their ultrasound tests in his office in a Yamunanagar strip mall. And he reports the names of those doctors who do to the government.
In response, doctors refuse to refer their patients to him, his family has been physically threatened, and he was thrown out of the local branch of the Indian Medical Association.
Asked how he copes, he says: "My family is small, my house is small, my daughters don't ask for much money."
In New Delhi, one of the city's top obstetricians, Dr. Puneet Bedi, has likewise been blackballed by his associates for his stance against "female
feticide."
"I can work only as a visiting consultant and only work at small
hospitals," he says sadly. "But that is the price you pay. Feticide is the
tip of the iceberg on medical malpractice here.
"Feticide was invented, touted and sold by the medical profession, and it operates with the complete consent of all factors of society," he says.
What keeps him going?
"Oh, nothing," he responds. "A lot of us are quite frustrated. I didn't choose to be an activist. But the amount of malpractice is so bad here -- either you get involved in it or you get desensitized to it. I know a lot of good doctors who do not practice it, but they also do not speak against it.
"Of my 10 first cousins in Punjab, no one has had a daughter in 10 years," he says. "You hope someone else would be stupid enough to produce a girl but not you."
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20070226-1...
By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published February 27, 2007
*Second of four parts*
"May you be the mother of a hundred sons" -- a Sanskrit blessing
KANPUR, India -- The best day of Varsha Hitkari's life was her wedding day when, dressed in a red sari with a gold veil and hennaed hands, she was presented to her new husband, Rakesh Kumar.
The ceremony eight years ago, accompanied by much festivity, featured a bride with a beautifully sculpted face who possessed degrees in sociology and law. The groom was a government official.
The bride's parents had to agree, as part of the dowry arrangement, to pay all the expenses of their grandchildren's births. The husband also demanded 100,000 rupees -- worth about $2,200 -- so he could buy an acre of land. Her parents refused to pay up, but they did provide a motorcycle.
As for the bride's in-laws, they wanted her to produce sons. In that, Mrs. Hitkari failed. Instead, she had two daughters: Himadri, now 5-1/2, and Pari, 18 months. Her husband began berating her, demanding more dowry. When Mrs. Hitkari put Himadri into a school, her mother-in-law criticized her for
educating a girl.
On July 23, Mrs. Hitkari's parents say, the mother-in-law and husband beat the woman senseless, then hanged her by a noose from a shower head. The bride's brother, Navneet Chandra, happened to drop by the home and, glancing through an open door to the bathroom, was horrified to see his sister hanging there.
While the brother was trying to free his sister from the noose, Mr. Kumar was pulling on his wife's legs to try to tighten its grip. Only when Mr. Chandra's shouts roused the neighbors did the tug of war stop.
Mrs. Hitkari remained in a coma for six weeks, her story the stuff of local newspaper headlines. She came home to her family Sept. 18, able to sit up but not stand. Her movements were feeble; she could not speak and appeared to have suffered brain damage.
The 30-year-old woman now sits in a stark bedroom at her parents' home, a blank expression in her brown eyes. Her daughters mill about, trying to attract her attention.
Her father, Ramesh Chandra, is retired and cannot afford $4,500 for the kind of physical therapy she will need to recover.
And despite widespread publicity, local police have not made any arrests.
*Omnipresent violence
*Uttar Pradesh, India's largest state with 166 million people, is one of the country's poorest and most-illiterate regions. Its largest city, Kanpur, is a fetid industrial metropolis of 2.6 million on the Ganges River, known for its leather tanneries, cotton mills and a military base. It has no public transportation, no middle class, no city garbage collection, no sidewalks and dismal air quality.
Even worse is the violence perpetuated on its women and unborn girls. Neelam Chaturvedi was 16 when she first noticed the way women in her neighborhood were beaten by their husbands. Then she read that a woman had been gang-raped by four men -- and the blame was placed on the victim. Miss
Chaturvedi's father, a trade union organizer, encouraged her to organize a women's group and, in 1981, she founded Mahila Manch, or Platform for Women.
Later, she co-founded Sakhi Kendra, or Circle of Friends, and turned it into a charity that occupies a three-story building not far from the town garbage dump. Sixty to 70 women contact them every day with horror stories.
First, there are the baby girls who, simply because they are female, are put on piles of dry grass and burned. Or they are placed in bags and fatally stabbed.
Then, there are the acid attacks. If a woman refuses a man's advances, he may throw sulfuric acid in her face, disfiguring her and rendering the woman unfit for marriage. Women are defenseless against such attacks as criminal prosecution is rare.
"The father doesn't kill the man who rapes his daughter; instead, they dispose of her," said Dr. Veronica Jacob, a volunteer with Sakhi Kendra.
"The thinking here is warped. Even if India has advanced far in technology, the mind-set has not changed."
Sahki Kendra is sheltering one doe-eyed young woman, Aradhana Rawat, 17, whose father would tie her to a bed and sexually abuse her. At one point, he tried to slit her throat with a machete. Tears pour down her face as she clutches a blue scarf and tells her story through a translator.
"My father said, 'If you tell others about this, I'll make sure others do the same thing to you,' " she remembers. A brother finally brought her to Sakhi Kendra.
Other cases brought to Sakhi Kendra include a mother who was told she must not feed her fourth daughter. Then there is the woman whose husband poured hot coals on her abdomen after she bore a daughter. And a wife who was tortured with cigarette butts by her husband because she bore only girls. Summoned to the scene, local police only took a report.
The fact that it's the man, not the woman, who contributes the Y chromosome that determines the child's sex, has not caught on.
Sex selection
Dr. Mamta Vyas, a gynecologist and president of Sakhi Kendra, constantly gets asked by pregnant women to determine the sex of their children. She knows that if she lets on the child is a girl, the woman will likely abort if she can find the money.
"Here in Uttar Pradesh, they're not satisfied with one boy," she says. "They want more. There is no limit. A lady would produce eight or nine girls while trying for a male child."
But no more. Ultrasound machines, by which one can discern the child's genitals after 90 days, have vastly reduced the number of girls born in the state until there are just 916 girls born for 1,000 boys. According to Outlook, a New Delhi magazine, the ratio in the city of Kanpur is worse with just 869 girls.
But sometimes the sonogram images are wrong, Dr. Vyas adds, "and the technologists, if they are not sure, will say it's a female child so they can make money on it."
The girls who are born often end up in orphanages like that run by Mother Teresa's Missionary Sisters of Charity on the outskirts of the city.
Of the 40 children there, 37 are girls and many are agonizingly small, their tiny bodies disturbingly still in wicker cribs, listless and unloved.
Will they be adopted? Dr. Vyas doubts it.
"In India, families want to pass on property to their own flesh and blood," she says.
Sakhi Kendra's work got some publicity in January 2006 when Outlook sent pregnant women to local clinics asking for illegal sonograms. The reporter found lines of women waiting for the service and all the radiologists booked solid.
Despite the mandatory government sign saying, "No sex determinational tests taken," only one refused to provide the service.
"I am the only person in Kanpur who is not involved in such murders," Dr. Vikas Gupta said.
Network of activists
India's skewed sex ratios have created a network of activists across India who transcend religion and caste. They are, however, split on the question of abortion in general, which is free in government hospitals.
"We do not mind abortions. We do not think all abortions are bad. I think some abortions help women," said Roop Rekha Verma, founder of Saajhi Duniya, a women's rights group in the Uttar Pradesh capital of Lucknow. "But we think sex-selective abortion is a crime."
Prem Chowdhry, a New Delhi-based scholar who studies male-female relations in north India, said the same.
"Abortion is not considered immoral here," she told an American reporter. "That's your debate."
Elizabeth Bumiller, a reporter who 17 years ago penned the book "May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons," pointed out this commonly made distinction.
"Was it intellectually consistent to be in favor of a woman's right to abortion yet opposed to sex-selective abortion?" she wrote. "Some Indian feminists referred to sex-selective abortion as 'female feticide' which made me wonder why they were not opposed to 'male feticide' as well."
Swami Agnivesh, a well-known New Delhi-based social activist and president of the World Council of Arya Samaj, a Hindu reform movement, opposes all abortion and places the blame for female feticide at the feet of his own faith.
"We in the religious world are most responsible," he says, seated in bright orange robes in his New Delhi office. "In all religions, women have been relegated to a second-class position.
"The Hindu religious establishment is completely rotted from within. It has moved away from the universal values of the Vedas and Upanishads [scriptures]. The caste system is a total distortion of the Vedas."
"The goddess worship in his culture is powerless to stop the killing," he said.
"How come in India where Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, is worshipped the most, yet we are one of the poorest countries in the world?" he asks.
"God smiles on the United States and Europe but not on us."
The worship of Saraswati, goddess of learning, has likewise been ineffective.
"We have the most illiterate people on the planet," he says. "The real worship is to respect the girl child. The false goddesses are worshipped, and the real goddesses are slaughtered."
The best-known activist against female feticide, Sabu George, 48, was raised as a Syrian Orthodox Catholic in the southern Indian state of Kerala.
While studying for his master's degree at Johns Hopkins University's School of Public Health in Baltimore in the late 1980s, he investigated infanticide in the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu.
Starting in the early 1990s, he noticed that girls were not getting killed after birth so much as not being allowed to be born at all, thanks to the sonogram machine.
He tirelessly travels the country energizing activists, unencumbered by family. He dresses simply and carries an omnipresent black knapsack with his laptop. "I only work," he says with a smile.
He counts doctors among his worst enemies.
"In the West, unethical doctors are targeted," he says. "Here, it is the opposite. We have the trappings of the West with none of the ethics or the professionalism. In a feudal society like ours, there's no concept of the dignity of the worker."
One doctor he does admire is Puneet Bedi, a Sikh obstetrician who specializes in fetal medicine and high-risk pregnancy. Seated in a cafe outside Indraprastha Apollo Hospital in south New Delhi, Dr. Bedi says population-control groups in the West helped jump-start India's female feticides.
"Post World War II, the world had this concept of hyperbreeding in India," Dr. Bedi says. "Everyone felt there were too many people in Asia.
"If you saw the Malthusian projections from the 1950s, everyone thought India and China would take over the world. So it was birth control at any cost in India and China."
Several American foundations -- he specifies MacArthur, Ford and Packard -- sank money into Third World birth-control programs and predictably, India began its first family-planning program in 1952.
"But what they ran into was son preference," says Dr. Bedi. "Everyone had to have two sons in case one died. So the average family size remained at four or five children. The government was under pressure to do something."
The only way to control population was to somehow guarantee sons. By the 1970s, women could determine their child's sex through amniocentesis.
Although India outlawed this at government hospitals in 1979, "the private clinics had discovered this gold mine," he said. Ultrasound machines became popularized in the mid-1980s.
"Feticide was invented, touted and sold by the medical profession, and it operates with the complete consent of all factors of our society," Dr. Bedi says. "Abortion has been sold as a patriotic duty. So, killing female babies was an extension of that.
"At least in Europe and North America, there's some guilt connected with an abortion. Here, there's not. We call them 'coffee-bar abortions'; she comes in for an abortion and relaxes at a coffee bar afterwards," he says, waving an arm toward young couples gathered at nearby tables.
"By the early 1990s, no one who didn't want a daughter needed to have one."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.washingtontimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20070227-1...
Lots of stings, no
pain<http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20070227-100432-3539r.htm>
By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published February 28, 2007
*Third of four parts*
"In childhood a female must be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, when her lord is dead to her sons; a woman must never be independent." -- Verse 5:148 in the Hindu laws of Manu
JAIPUR, India -- Meena Sharma, a 26-year-old freelance reporter, knew there were massive violations of government law forbidding doctors from telling pregnant women the sex of their unborn children and using abortion to eliminate unwanted girls.
She approached Shripal Shaktawat, Jaipur bureau chief of the Sahara Samay TV network, with an idea he could not refuse. What if she lined up several pregnant women with TV cameras hidden in their purses who would say their fetus was a girl and they wanted an abortion? Miss Sharma would go along, playing the part of the woman's aunt or mother-in-law.
"It was an emotional issue for me," said the reporter, who remembers as a 14-year-old seeing one of her pregnant aunts being instructed by a physician to abort the female fetus.
In nine episodes from April 4 to June 13, the TV network aired a 12-hour series, "Murder in the Womb." It was based on undercover visits to 140 health clinics in 36 cities in four Indian states: Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Gujarat.
Doctors in 100 clinics either agreed to do a sex-determination test and abortion or gave referrals to other doctors who would. Both actions are illegal.
Mr. Shaktawat, who posed as a husband, and his "wife" would tell doctors they already had daughters and had no wish to birth any more.
"Now the baby has grown bigger and it will come out alive," Dr. Nidhi Malhotra from the city of Chittorgarh in south Rajasthan is shown saying in Hindi on the hidden video. "Will you kill it?"
That same video shows the doctor laughing as she levels a fee of 2,000 rupees (about $44) to abort a child in the seventh month of pregnancy.
It had taken Miss Sharma a year to compile the devastating report, which showed doctor after doctor on camera illegally urging the women -- all of whom were at least in their fifth month or more -- to abort their female offspring. Abortion is illegal in India after the 20th week unless there are threats to the mother's health.
The documentaries shamed the region's most prominent doctors. A group of physicians offered the station $34 million to cancel the series.
On April 14, the government filed charges against 21 Rajasthan doctors in the series -- but did not prosecute them. The Rajasthan Medical Council suspended the licenses of seven -- but allowed them to continue practicing.
Then in the early morning hours of April 18, a group of six men threw stones and broke windows at Mr. Shaktawat's home. He was away in New Delhi, but his family was told worse would happen to them if the series was not stopped.
*Majestic Jaipur*
Jaipur is known as India's "Pink City" for the luminous rose-colored buildings scattered across the Rajasthani desert and its majestic palaces and gardens. Many of the physicians who were shown on TV urging illegal abortions several months ago live in some of the city's most splendid suburbs.
The Washington Times visited the homes of four of the doctors, all of whom were said to either not be at home or not willing to talk with a reporter. As a reporter and photographer approached the Bhandari Hospital and Research Center, home base for Dr. Rekha Bhandari, a security guard at the entrance to the doctor's two-story home across the street picked up a phone. He said the doctor was not available.
This reporter also approached the gated home of Dr. Sheelu Jain, another doctor implicated in the sting operation as offering to abort a female fetus. She briefly appeared at her gate, then fled.
Dr. P.C. Ranka, who along with his wife was accused of giving an illegal referral to an abortion clinic, was just starting his evening office hours when The Times paid a visit to his home office.
"I am a medicine person," he protested. "I do not do gynecology."
Kavita Srivastava, a local lawyer and general secretary for the human rights organization People's Union for Civil Liberties, said it's no surprise so many doctors in Jaipur are guilty.
"The status of women is already low here because of the feudal Rajput
culture," she said, referring to the former ruling caste.
"There are traditions in Rajasthan of women committing johar which is mass suicide or sati where a widow throws herself onto her husband's funeral pyre. A woman's entire identity was subsumed by her husband. If he died, so must she."
Women who committed sati would have temples built in their honor, she added, and palaces in Rajasthan commonly have a wall displaying the last hand prints women left before they died.
"In a woman's death there was value," the activist said. "In her
survival, there never was value."
In Rajasthan's violent desert culture, baby girls were drowned in boiling milk or abandoned in a sand dune. Whole villages went decades without female children.
A 1994 law that forbids sex-selective abortions only regulates the medical profession; it does not address the anti-female cast of an entire culture, Ms. Srivastava said.
*Long-term disaster*
Currently, women-starved parts of western India are importing women. The best trafficking season, reports Supriya Awasthi, South Asia director for Free the Slaves, a New Delhi-based advocacy group, is in the summer during the monsoons, when people are most hungry and desperate.
Girls from Nepal and Bangladesh constitute 70 percent of all trafficked girls. Top Nepalese hubs are the capital Katmandu; Sindhupalchowk, a district north of Katmandu; and Makwanpur, which is east of the capital.
They end up at a slave market known as Phoolbagh in the Purnia district of Bihar, India's poorest state. Girls are then traded to circuses or loaded on trucks or trains bound for states like Punjab and Haryana, which have the country's worst male-female sex ratios.
Miss Awasthi particularly remembers one 12-year-old she ran into in Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh. She had been raped by five men and was three months pregnant. She had a baby boy, who died.
People go to huge lengths to unload their girl children, she said. "The government bans child marriage but nothing substantial has been done so far.
"The police can be moved to take action only if there is pressure from the local people who complain to local bureaucrats. Or a court can direct police to act. Or they will act out of pressure from the media."
The shortage of women here has opened the market for "paros," or trafficked women, purchased for 12,000 to 15,000 rupees, or $260 to $330.
Those under 14 go for less: 5,000 to 10,000 rupees, or $110 to $220.
Virendra Vidrohi, Rajasthan state organizer for the Campaign Against Child Labor, said trucks ply India's national highways working with agents who put in "orders."
"If a man wants a woman from Bihar," he said, "he'll contact his local agent and put down an advance, usually 5,000 rupees. The agent will then contact the truck owners who will contact their agents in Bihar or Andhra Pradesh," another eastern Indian state. Normally, it takes three to six months to get a woman. He estimates there are 15,000 paros in Mewat, a district of Rajasthan about 100 miles south of New Delhi.
Mr. Vidrohi, 44, who wears wire rims and his hair tied in a greying ponytail, oversees a group of five organizations made up of Muslim, Hindu, Sikh and Christian activists dedicated to helping poor women. For him, the Mewat region is the canary in the mine for the rest of India.
He is based in Alwar, a town of about 65,000, surrounded by villages where trafficked women live. The sex ratio here is a low 887 women to 1,000 men.
A half-hour's drive away through fields of mustard, millet and lentils turns up a desperately poor village of 422 families that has been afflicted by the local drought. There are 15 paros there. Mohammed Hanif, the local
imam in a white turban and a salt-and-pepper beard, admitted, "They are not treated the same as other women."
Two sisters: Kuraisha Khan, 30, and Nuraisha Khan, 25, were kidnapped from the Chatra district of Jharkhand, next to Bihar.
Kuraisha, the mother of two girls, is pregnant with her third child. She gets two meals a day, she said and was brought to Mewat by train and bus.
Nuraisha cradled a 1-year-old son in her arms.
"It was not her decision to come here," her older sister said, "it was her parents' decision."
Other women tell much the same story; usually it is a brother-in-law who arranges to have them and their sisters shipped far away from their home towns in eastern India. One is Sarbari Bano, 22, mother of two girls, who was brought in by train from Jharkhand. Wearing a light green veil and faded
blue dress, she is pregnant again.
"I want boys," she said.
Israel Khan, 26, is one of the few men present who admitted to importing a wife for 4,000 rupees, about $90.
"I was poor and couldn't get a wife here," he said. His paro, Rakshana Begum, squatted in the corner. She has given him two boys and three girls.
He is no longer poor now; he owns five water buffaloes and a cell phone; his home has whitewashed stone walls, a thatched roof, several beds, an electric fan and quilts hanging from the rafters.
Anguman Begum, 38, another paro, approached him for financial help. He ignored her. She was an orphan when her uncle brought her to Mewat at age 8. She was from the state of Assam, hundreds of miles to the northeast.
"I was crying," she remembered of her unhappy journey 30 years ago, "because I couldn't understand the language here. If I wanted to go back to Assam, there was no way to get there."
Now she has seven children and like it or not, Mewat is her home.
"But if I had the money," she said, "I'd go back."
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.washtimes.com/functions/print.php?StoryID=20070228-113751-...
GE machines used to break
law<http://www.washingtontimes.com/world/20070228-113751-7882r.htm>
By Julia Duin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published March 1, 2007
*Last of four parts*
"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." — Josef Stalin
BANGALORE, India — The streets are cleaner here in the country's tech capital of Bangalore than elsewhere in India; still, squalor surrounds the modern glass-walled offices of dozens of American and European corporations.
Security guards pursue anyone wishing to linger by the gates of General Electric's walled-off compound in the exclusive Whitefields suburb east of town. In 1990, the giant American multinational teamed up with Wipro Ltd., a Bangalore software provider, to manufacture and distribute a low-cost ultrasound machine.
Why ultrasound machines? GE spokesmen have repeatedly refused to comment on the matter, but by 2000, according to www.gehealthcare.com, Wipro-GE had shipped out 6,500 of the machines in India. Wipro's Web site, www.wiprocorporate.com, claims it pioneered the manufacture of ultrasound equipment for India.
GE's latest portable machine is the Logiq 100 model. Its American equivalent, the Logiq Book XP, sells for $16,900 new or $11,000 refurbished, according to the sales department at National Ultrasound, an American distributor based in Duluth, Ga.
Indian activists who oppose the widespread abortion of female fetuses say GE is among a handful of companies that manufacture the machines for the Indian market.
Under Indian law, doctors operating ultrasound machines must fill out forms showing the reason for each procedure, which is permitted only in the case of an abnormal pregnancy. But the government can only monitor the 25,770 machines that have been officially registered.
The actual number of machines is estimated at anywhere from 70,000 — by the London Daily Mail — to 100,000, according to the British Medical Journal. The portable ones end up in rural areas, where technology makes it possible for any woman to determine the sex of her child. The fetus can then be terminated at a government hospital, where abortions, like other procedures, are free for those who cannot pay.
Sabu George, a New Delhi activist who in 2000 filed a lawsuit against the government for failing to enforce its own laws against female feticide, said findings have revealed a disproportionate number of GE machines in northwest India, which has the lowest proportion of females to males.
"Those concerned with human rights [must] expose the transnational corporations involved in marketing ultrasound machines for these purposes," he said, adding that Wipro-GE especially targets smaller towns with the help of cheap credit provided by GE Capital Services India.
The situation is only going to get worse, he added, as new technologies are now making it possible to select male embryos over female ones for implantation into a woman's womb.
"In the United States, ultrasound is used to protect the fetus," he said. "Here it is used to destroy it."
*Women in black*
The airy two-story brick building set around a garden atrium in a Bangalore suburb offers no hint at the serious matters facing Vimochana, a women's rights group based there.
Its leader, Donna Fernandes, blames doctors for India's soaring male-female imbalance. "Doctors are a bunch of criminals," she said, "but no one wants to see them as such. They are a powerful class, economically and politically."
Although India has a well-established law forbidding doctors from telling women the sex of their unborn child, few physicians will turn in a guilty colleague. "It is," Mrs. Fernandes said, "like setting a trap for a rat to catch another rat."
"Female feticide," the Indian term for the abortions of millions of baby girls over the past few decades, is a $100 million industry.
Although India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, termed female feticide an "unacceptable" crime in a press conference last summer, his own culture stands against him. One 1987 study by the Federation of Obstetricians' and Gynecologists' Societies of India showed that out of 8,000 abortions, 7,999 occurred after tests showed a female fetus.
A University of Bombay study done about the same time by professor R.P. Ravindra showed that out of 1,000 cases in Bombay, he could not find a single case of a male fetus being aborted. Ninety-seven percent of the aborted fetuses were female and the other 3 percent were of undetermined sex.
Bangalore, India's third largest city at 7 million people, has 743
clinics with a registered ultrasound machine. The unofficial rate for a sex-determination test is 10,000 rupees or about $220.
Doctors are required to fill out a "Form F," giving the reason for the ultrasound test, whether the woman has previously had children and including a signed statement by both the woman and her doctor saying they do not want to know — or divulge — the sex of the child.
These must be submitted to a district health officer, whose job it is to make sure illegal sex determination tests are not taking place. But doctors rarely turn in the forms and local government officials seldom ask for them.
In recent years, activist groups have conducted sting operations with pregnant women carrying hidden cameras, Mrs. Fernandes said, to showcase how brazenly the law is being broken.
"The doctors now use code language," she said. "They will put a red dot — meaning 'danger' — on the form or green for a 'go ahead.' " Red would signify a girl; green a boy.
Clinics found breaking the law have either had their machines briefly impounded or been let off by judges on technicalities. In one case, "the doctor bribed the judge," Mrs. Fernandes said. "For the woman who wants a boy, the very survival of her marriage may depend on it."
As bad as Bangalore is, the Mandya district to the west is even worse, she said. The mostly rural district of 1.7 million people has sex ratios as low as 600 girls to every 1,000 boys, suggesting that nearly two out of every five girls conceived are aborted.
On most Saturdays, Mrs. Fernandes' group stages "women in black" demonstrations in front of ultrasound clinics in Mandya, a city on the main highway between Bangalore and the city Mysore, the seat of a former princely
state.
"They all say only a few quacks are doing this," she said, "but hundreds of doctors are involved. There's a total denial of this happening."
*Official response*
Dr. G. Shivaram, district health officer for Bangalore, oversees the city's health care out of a rundown hospital off Old Madras Road. Behind him is a poster: "Female feticide is cruel and barbaric. It is illegal and punishable under the PNDT Act," referring to the 1994 law barring the use of ultrasound for sex determination.
Although the penalty for breaking the law was increased in 2002 to three years in jail and a $230 fine for the first offense and five years jail and $1,160 for the second, it is almost never enforced.
Although it is Dr. Shivaram's responsibility to check the two-page "Form F" to make sure women are telling the truth about their ultrasounds, he admits he doesn't read them.
"We assume they are filled out correctly," he said. "We just get the numbers of women.
"Each clinic has hundreds of patients. Doctors are busy," he added.
"They don't have the time to fill them all out and the people who help the patients fill them out only have a secondary school education."
However, a copy of the form obtained by The Washington Times showed it contained questions any pregnant woman should be able to answer.
"Not that many" doctors are illegally telling women the sex of their child, Dr. Shivaram maintained, admitting this is a guess as his office has conducted no sting operations. He said he personally visits 15 to 20 clinics each month, which would mean he gets to each clinic at most once every four years. Licenses must be renewed every five years.
Doctors attest to him that they are not revealing the sex of the fetus, "and I do believe them," he said. "Doctors will say the truth because of professional ethics. Maybe some doctors are lying, but how can we assess that?"
On a national level, government efforts to combat prenatal sex selection are limited primarily to print and broadcasting advertisements, sponsoring workshops and seminars and providing financial aid to some advocacy groups.
Last month, however, Renuka Chowdhury, the Cabinet minister for women and child development, announced plans for a nationwide network of orphanages where women could drop off unwanted baby daughters.
"We want to put a cradle in every district. What we are saying to the people is: 'Have your children, don't kill them,' " Ms. Chowdhury told the Press Trust of India news service.
When asked if the scheme could backfire by giving women an easy way to get rid of unwanted girls, she replied: "It doesn't matter. It's better than killing them."
Mr. George, who has battled female feticide for the past two decades, scoffed at the scheme.
"Most of the girls are killed before birth, not after birth. So where is the option of abandoning girls if they are not born at all?" he told Agence France-Presse after the announcement.
Activists warn that nothing will change until authorities begin
enforcing the law.
*Hyderabad success*
Arvind Kumar was a government official in Hyderabad, a city of 6.1million in south India, when he saw the 2001 census figures showing the country's skewed birth ratios. In Hyderabad, the ratio was 933 girls to every 1,000 boys. The wards of the cities with the worst ratios were the ones that had the most ultrasound machines registered there.
He also noticed a religious divide; the Sikhs of northern India had the worst sex ratios, followed by the Jains and then the Hindus. Christians had the best ratios and in highly Christianized areas such as the southern state of Kerala, there were more women born than men. Kerala's matrilineal family system among all religious groups also encourages education and empowerment
of women.
This was not so in Hyderabad, a city with a mix of Hindu and Muslim communities. Mr. Kumar began cracking down on the city's doctors, ordering the 389 clinics with registered ultrasound machines to show up for a workshop. Some 124 centers failed to show. He then ordered them to turn in "F Forms" for every ultrasound given, copies of referrals from doctors and
documentation on whether the woman who got the ultrasound ever gave birth.
Fifty-three centers refused to give him any information at all.
Of the paperwork he did receive, he found that in 67 percent of the cases, the woman arrived at the clinic without the required referral from a doctor; a sign, he said, that she intended to abort the child. In 72 percent of the cases, there was no documentation of whether the woman already had children. Statistics show the percentage of abortions rise with each successive daughter.
Sixty-nine percent of the forms he got did not mention the address of the ultrasound center and 56 percent did not mention how far along the woman was in her pregnancy. Sex-selective tests tend to occur around the fourth month.
He went on local TV, threatening to send pregnant women into clinics for sting operations. He found no shortage of women willing to do so; "They'd tell me, 'It's for a good cause,' " he said.
By January 2005, he had sent out 374 notices to ultrasound clinics threatening to suspend. One hundred two clinics had their registrations suspended, 112 ultrasound machines had been seized by police and three suppliers, including Wipro-GE, had been prosecuted in court for supplying machines to clinics without registering them with the government.
After only one year, yearly birth statistics for girls in Hyderabad had shot up 4,000 from 58,422 in 2004 to 62,654 in 2005. The number of boys born hovered at 61,539 in 2004 and 61,770 in 2005.
Mr. Kumar is reluctant to credit himself with the births of 4,000 extra girls.
"The [1994] act was dormant," he said, "and all I did was implement it. All I did was catch those who weren't maintaining the records and prosecute them. Other cities say, 'Oh, we can't do this.' But we did it."
