Indian families are offered money to tackle the problem of abortion of girl foetuses

In order to put the kibosh on abortions of female foetuses (about 500 000 per year), the indian government has announced on March 3 that a new allowance will soon be paid to poor families for them to give birth to the girls and then bring them up. Parents from seven States in the country can expect to earn around 15 500 rupees (253 euros) per each girl raised within the families which meet the criteria under the government scheme.

In India, and particularly in remote and rural areas, families justify their preference for male babies due to the perceived cost of marrying off a daughter and the contrasting anticipated benefits of having a male child. This traditional conception leads to millions of daughters being killed even before they are born.

According to the most recent national census, the country’s gender ratio is 933 females to 1,000 males but in some remote villages the difference is far greater. A recent study published in the medical journal The Lancet reveals that about 10 million female foetuses may have been aborted in India over the past 20 years. The new government scheme is aimed to stop such practices.

With the electronic sex determination tests now offered more and more easily to expectant couples in western countries the practice has grown dramatically over the past few decades. However, the recourse to pre-natal sex determination – except in a few cases – has been banned for more than a decade in India.

And yet such tests and the subsequent abortions of female foetuses continue, even in India’s largest urban areas. Last year a doctor in Gurgaon, the hi-tech satellite city adjoining Delhi, was arrested after admitting to aborting more than 250 such foetuses over the past 10 years.

Families under the scheme announced by the Indian authorities will be required to respect some conditions though. The money will be allocated only once the daughter reaches the age of 18 and can prove that she has been to school. Her nutrition and health will also be checked and for the family to receive the sum, the young woman must not be married.

The project will be tested out in the seven states where girls face the worst discrimination – Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, Jharkhand, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab.