Modi’s race to save India’s girls

PM launched “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (Save a daughter, educate a daughter)” programme, in January to fight the nation’s deep-rooted bias against daughters. While the 1990s saw three such programmes, since 2005 there have been 11 schemes to ensure that more girls – discriminated against at birth and in upbringing – are born, live, go to school and do not marry early. Yet, the girls continue to disappear

Amritsar: It’s a substantial but sparse two-room house, and flies infest the courtyard, buzzing ceaselessly around Manseerat Gill, 14 days old. Undisturbed by their buzzing, she sleeps peacefully. For the next six years—thanks to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s determination to fight the country’s bias against daughters—Manseerat’s well-being and survival will be the responsibility of a 6-foot-tall man with piercing eyes and a full, flowing grey beard. Ranjit Singh Buttar is a rare male gynaecologist here in this holy Sikh city, and as district health officer, he has many other tasks, including running rural health centres, delivering contraceptives and ensuring polio inoculations to every new born.

Amritsar is one of 100 Indian “gender-critical” districts—10 are in Punjab, among India’s five richest states by per capita income—included in Modi’s “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (Save a daughter, educate a daughter)” programme, launched in January. Modi is not the first PM to realise that India is losing girls. While the 1990s saw three such programmes, since 2005 there have been 11 schemes to ensure that more girls—discriminated against at birth and in upbringing—are born, live, go to school and do not marry early. Yet, the girls continue to disappear. About 2,000 girls die—aborted or starved, poisoned or otherwise killed after birth—every day in India, according to Women & Child Development Minister Maneka Gandhi, who provided this data in April. The estimates of women so missing range from 2 million to 25 million.

PM Modi’s Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao programme appears to focus on changing mindsets. Its first step is to spread awareness: Mobile vans and material have reached districts. What has not reached districts is money. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley set aside Rs 100 crore for Beti Bachao, Beti Padhaoin the 2015-16 budget. Each district in the hundred gender-critical districts will get Rs 55 lakh for 2014-15, followed by Rs Rs 31 lakh in 2015-16. Buttar’s office is yet to get the first tranche of funds, two months after Jaitley’s announcement. Minister Gandhi’s office did not respond to IndiaSpend’s interview request. India’s political history is littered with programmes to protect girls such as Manseerat. Most have been of limited or no efficacy, hobbled by a rigid array of conditions and uncertainties about why they have not worked.

“(Our) findings point to the need to simplify the eligibility criteria and conditionalities, and also the procedures of registration under each of these schemes,” noted a United Nations Population Fund study. “Though year after year substantial financial resources have been directed towards promoting these schemes, there is a lack of field-level monitoring. In the absence of a proper grievance-redressal mechanism, the challenges often multiply. In some states, lack of coordination across different sectors such as health, education and social welfare is adversely affecting programme implementation.”

Over two years, 2011-2013, no more than 32 people were punished under the law that criminalises pre-birth gender testing; gender-testing cases reported stood at 563, according to the Press Trust of India. Thirty states have not had even one conviction under this law, noted the Supreme Court. Outside Buttar’s cabin, junior officer Tripta Sharma explained how she successfully played a decoy pregnant woman. She was sent to an ultra-sound clinic that was alleged to have violated the law by offering gender tests. The police made an arrest. But eight court appearances over a year and a half exhausted Sharma. The court dismissed the case.

By Aparna Kalra