Sex ratio vs. Economic growth

I would've never imagined that there was a correlation. It could just be a coincidence but turns out that the areas with the worst sex ratio in the country also have the slowest economic growth. Any reason why?

We've talked about the state of Punjab on this blog repeatedly for having the worst sex ratio in the country. The sex ratio for the age group of 0-6 in Punjab as per the 2001 census and a UNPF Survey was 798 in 2001 and the lowest in the country. In addition to that, according to a survey conducted by ActionAid, a UK based non-profit organization, this sex ratio has worsened since 2001. Latest figures from one site in the Punjab, India’s richest state, show the number of girls has plummeted to just 300 compared to 1000 boys amongst higher cast families.

Now, another survey done by The Associations of Obstetricians and Gynecologists of Delhi (AOGD) shows that it is a Union Territory that takes the lead away from Punjab. The Union Territory Daman and Diu, as per the reports, has only 591 women for 1000 men. So, the summary up until now is that the top two areas in India with the LOWEST sex ratio are:
1. Daman and Diu (Union Territory): Worst sex ratio in the country
2. Punjab (State): Second worst sex ratio in the country

Further, economic reports show that Punjab, despite being the most prosperous state of India in the past, is now gradually staggering behind rest of the states in the country. If newspapers are to be believed, one of them reports:

Punjab, which long prided itself for its highest per capita income, has slipped to the eighth rung since 2001, even behind its one-time backwater sibling Haryana. Worse, it is now saddled with the dubious distinction of being the slowest growing state, only a shade better than Daman and Diu.

Ah! So, Punjab still comes out better than Daman and Diu eh. Let's get this straight as well. The two areas in India with the LOWEST economic growth:
1. Daman and Diu (Union Territory): Lowest economic growth in the country
2. Punjab (State): Second lowest economic growth in the country

Do you note any connection between LOWEST sex ratio and LOWEST economic growth? There could be a logical explanation behind it or it just could be a sheer coincidence albeit a very interesting one. What do you say?

More hope ...

Continuing an ancient tradition in India, most lower caste women work as scavengers after marriage. They simply follow in the footsteps of their female relatives.

Laxmi Nanda, a 27-year-old woman from the northwest Indian state of Rajasthan, worked as a scavenger for nine years. Every day she removed the waste, transporting it in a bowl carried on her head. "It was a very dirty job. We never liked it. We were always suffering from some kind of diseases and things like that-no respect in the society. And it was very degrading. We never wanted to do that," she said, describing her past life

With the help of Bindeshwar Pathak, the founder of the Sulabh International Social Service Organization, one of India's largest NGOs, women like Laxmi no longer do this work. Sulabh retrains the women so they can find other work doing embroidery or making noodles and pickles.

[...]

Pathak says Sulabh has improved sanitation and decreased some diseases, installing toilets in homes and public places. "The toilets are being built both in urban areas, rural areas, and in public places, tourist places, religious places. When we started, millions of children used to die due to diarrhea, dehydration, cholera. Now the number has gone down to half a million."

More power to organizations like Sulabh. Before reading this, I didn't even know what scavenging was and there were people actually doing such jobs manually. Saddening.

Hope for now....

What better way to begin this week than with a video about our homegrown vigilantes.
Related Reading: Beacon of Hope

Indian girl-boy sex ratio at an all time low!

Despite the positive news that are coming out of media like the following:
1. India officials catch doctor engaged in sex-selection abortion, faces Jail
2. Popularity of 'only-girl child' seats in Panjab University
3. 12 sex determination centers sealed by government after surprize night time raids in Uttar Pradesh
4. The medical community protests against female foeticide by marching on the streets of Delhi

.... there are also news that still shock me ....

ActionAID had declared last month that the sex ratio is only dipping downwards. No amount of awareness or people talking about the consequences of the unbalanced ratio is having an impact on the society. Why? India's sex selection crisis is worsening as per Action Aid and now we have another proof to Action Aid's claims. I had discussed the case of Nawanshahar (Punjab) on this blog earlier as well. Once again, Nawanshahar is in the news. A few years ago, it had stood as an example of reversing the trend of declining sex ratio when an able police officer had taken the situation in his hands like I discussed here, but now that he is gone, situation has been going downhill again. As Punjab News Line reports:

In the current year, the male-female sex ratio till April was just 796, a big decline from 909 in 2006 when the district had come from behind to top the state in the matter. At that time, this was made possible by some extraordinary steps which included strict enforcement measures in the shape of regular monitoring of scanning centres and clinics by the then DC Krishan Kumar and subsequent registration of cases against the erring centres and persons.

What shocks, hurts, and surprizes me the most is that women who are giving birth to children now are in the same age group as I am. Most of them must be born in late 70z or early 80z. I am an early 80 born. If I feel so strongly about equality of both genders, why are women (the city bred variety) my age who had a similar exposure to life, media, world et al as me giving into cultural pressures? Why are they aborting their daughters? Why are the women I might have gone to school with not valuing their own gender enough to let it survive? Why are reports coming out that female foeticide is only accelerating as opposed to deccelerating as it should with the new generation growing up? Generations are undergoing changes but our cultural mindset still remains the same. Why? Why can't women (and men) think for themselves and beyond what society imposes on them? Why can't all of us have independently rational minds?

Am I asking for too much? Perhaps I am because if an independent mind was a common entity, religion would never have become a priority in the lives of the majority of human race as it is now. I don't like when pessimism grips me but I do sincerely feel this is a lost cause. News from all the way across the world from Egypt also state that 2/3 of Egyptian men admit to sexually harassing women. What gets to me the most is the following trend that I did notice in India as well:

"The vast majority of women did nothing when confronted with sexual harassment," the survey said, adding that most Egyptian women believed the victim should "remain silent."

Of course, they have to remain silent or else they'd be gang-molested as two girls on New Year's eve this year in Mumbai when they spoke back to a group of men uttering profanities. I remained silent in India too every time I had ugly eyes stripping me and calling me words I wouldn't want anyone other than my husband saying. I remained silent in Egypt too when a policeman with a gun said 'I love you' to me on an empty street and no one around.

A shame really.

Mother at 70 for a boy!!

Points to note:

1. The woman, Omkari Singh Panwar, is 70 years old and her husband, Charan Singh Panwar, is 77.

2. The twins - a boy and a girl - were born to Omkari by a caesarian section after she controversially underwent IVF treatment, which cost 350,000 rupees (£4,375 or $9,000)-a small fortune in India. To pay for it Charan mortgaged his land, sold his buffalo, spent his life savings and took out a loan.

3. The couple already has two grown-up daughters and five grandchildren.

4. "I am very happy," Charam Singh, 75, the father of the twins, told ABC News through an interpreter. [...] "The desire for a male child has always been there, but God did not bless us with a male child," he said of the son who is a product of in vitro fertilization. "Now, we are very grateful to God, who has answered our prayers." [...] "At last we have a son and heir," he said. "We prayed to God, went to saints and visited religious places to pray for an heir. "We kept no stone unturned and God has rewarded us. The treatment cost me a fortune but the birth of a son makes it all worthwhile. I can die a happy man and a proud father," the paper states.

5. "It's a boy and he will take care of us in our old age. We will bring him up with the blessings of God. Now there is someone who can take care of family property and I hope that he can live well", said Omkari in the Youtube video posted above.

Aren't they 'old' already though? When is this 'old age' going to happen? Would the son be ready to take care of them by that time? Why can't their grown up daughters take care of them? What the heck is going on with the world? Imagine the pressure on sons too though. Their son will only be barely into his teens (most likely even earlier) when he'll have the responsibility of caring for his aging parents and his twin sister as well. Absolutely appalling.

The new born twins although born a month prematurely are doing fine in a hospital where they are in incubators. They were both only 2 pounds and nine ounces each when they were born.

No girls? Gay prostitution on a rise ...

Homosexual prostitution is on a rise in India especially in areas worst affected by female foeticide as per an article in Times of India. The article talks about a town called Mehsana in Gujarat where the sex ratio (as a result of female foeticide) has dropped so low that men are deprived of women to mate with. Hence, they are turning to fellow men for sexual gratification. TOI reports:

The 2001 census ranked Mehsana as the district with the worst skewed sex ratio of just 801 women per 1000 men. The after effects are being seen now, with the north Gujarat town witnessing a marked increase in gay activity.

All thanks to the dearth of eligible brides because of rampant foeticide over the years. Trends show that many affluent Mehsana men in their 30s are now wining and dining gays from Ahmedabad.

[...]

Increasing homosexuality is seen as the reason why Mehsana ranks after the migrant hub of Surat in terms of HIV prevalence. Mehsana's men have been known to buy brides from tribal areas, as there is an acute shortage of girls in most communities.

"While homosexuality is increasing everywhere, in the case of Mehsana the skewed sex ratio could be fueling this trend further," says sociologist Gaurang Jani.

Just for clarification sake, there is absolutely nothing wrong in homosexuality. The only notable issue in the report mentioned above is the coincidence of witnessing an increase in homosexual activity in a town worst affected by female foeticide in Gujarat. Question is whether most of these men would've had relations with other men had there been ample women to satisfy their sexual needs. Why are more men seeking sexual relations with men in Mehsana when compared to other places where the sex ratio is still a bit better? Homosexuality is not something that just dawns on you as you grow up. Studies have shown that our sexual orientation is something that we are born with. Are men in Mehsana prone to 'turn gay' in the womb owing to some environmental factors or is it really the lack of women that's driving them to alter their sexual orientation to cope with the new unnaturally unbalanaced state?

These questions need more conclusive research to be answered. However, I must say that if men are being driven to homosexuality just because of the situation that the society has created for itself by killing off the daughters, we are headed to an abysmally unnatural state. It is as bad as forcing a homosexual person to alter his sexual orientation to live a straight life as per the society recommends. That's repulsively wrong and should be condemned!

Related Readings:
Consequences of Female Foeticide

Edited to add: It should be clear that in Mehsana homosexuality may or may not be on a rise in general since the TOI report does not mention it but it does imply homosexual prostitution is definitely on a rise. Therefore, the men of Mehsana might or might not be 'turning gay' at all but they are definitely seeking male prostitutes for sexual reasons. As mentioned in the TOI article:

Suresh (name changed), a prominent figure in the gay circuit of Ahmedabad, is now being sought out frequently by unmarried men from Mehsana.

"I get at least eight to 10 calls each month from Mehsana who pick me up from Ahmedabad. We check into guest houses on the Ahmedabad-Mehsana highway," says Suresh, who works in a cloth merchant's office in Kalupur.

"Most of them prefer men over women as taking female sex workers to guest houses is risky," adds Suresh, who says there are at least half a dozen men like him in Ahmedabad who regularly entertain clients from Mehsana.

Female Foeticide

By Reeti Roy

Hi, My name is Reeti Roy and I'm nineteen years old.Many thanks to Roop Rai who gave me the opportunity to voice my opinion.When I say Female foeticide I mean (as others have already defined before me), the practice of aborting foetuses as soon as their sex is detected. Now it is all fine and fair to say that sex detection is abolished. Logically,any thinking, rational individual will agree. But if one looks at the living reality,we understand that the average poor farmer will justify by saying, "but the daughter is a curse. How will I pay dowry?"

So I think that if malpractices like Dowry are abolished,half the battle is won.

Foeticide according to me,is just as bad as Homicide.Foeticide should be a punishable offence.

How would a society function without its women?Why are women not given their true worth? Why are they STILL treated as vessels for childbirth? Why have men forgotten that it is their MOTHERS that gave birth to them? Everything I said has been said over and over again. This isn't even innovation? I am merely reiterating questions that have cropped up time and again. And yet, it is far easier to turn a blind eye to this Social Plague than to do something about it.

However there is still a ray of hope,as I found out form this article here

Another girl murdered .. and yet another .. and another ..

In continuation to my previous discussions on honor killing, here's a new piece of news. A man of Pakistani origin living in Georgia (US) killed his 25 year old daughter because she wanted to end her arranged marriage with a man she was forced to marry. Here's a You Tube video of the incident:



I have expressed my views on honor killings here earlier. This time, I'd like to share the views of a Canadian writer, Antonia Zerbisias, who writes:

It's very much a rerun of what we saw here last December, when Mississauga teen Aqsa Parvez was killed. Both her father and older brother face murder charges in her strangling death, which occurred after the girl had repeatedly flouted their restrictive ideas of how she should dress.

Meanwhile, south of the border, the more progressive pundits blame the misogyny inherent in so many societies in Asia and the Middle East, where, according to the United Nations, some 5,000 women every year are executed by their fathers, brothers or other male relatives, supposedly to preserve the family's good name.

If it were funny, it would be ironic.

I mean, how do you restore your reputation if you go around strangling your daughters and sisters?

It's confounding how this works.

Conceivably, men in these societies are guilty of all kinds of crimes against their religion and their states, whether we're talking gambling or drinking, burglary or murder, and yet their families don't seem to feel the need to stab them or stone them to death.

Unless they're gay, of course.

If this honour thing applied to all, prisons would close. If families cleaned up their own trash, the state wouldn't have to. Yet only the act of bringing recalcitrant women to heel is a matter of honour.

Paradoxically, the very fact of killing them is an admission that, as man of the house, you're a failure since you couldn't make your females submit. This is partly why so many men here kill themselves after killing their partners, at a rate of four women a day dead in the U.S. they, too, feel like failures.

Thankfully, considering the billions of people who live in the countries where these so-called "honour killings" are committed, the murders are relatively rare. (And yes, occasionally they have crossed religious lines.) In fact, but for a few feminist journalists, they were never even part of the Western discourse before 9/11.

I say "so-called" because that term "honour killing" diminishes the crime, which is femicide. It all but excuses the killer on cultural grounds.

What's more, it attributes motives, and the media should not do that. We don't report domestic homicides with phrases like "It was a she-talked-back-at-him-once-too-often killing" or "She wanted to leave him killing," do we?

With "honour killing," we buy into a political agenda. Indeed, it distracts from the real issues: patriarchy and control.

The fact is, much of the world is deeply misogynistic. In far too many countries, women are mere chattel, the property of men, passed from their fathers to their husbands.

But, if you want to make this about Islam and, Allah knows, so many do, then consider: If women are indeed the inferior sex in Islam, then it stands to reason that allowances would be made for their weaknesses. And, if men are their betters, wouldn't their religion hold them to a higher standard?

You'd think. But it's not about that.

The real "honour" here is about power, and who has it. Sometimes, when women defy men, they take that power, and some men will stop at nothing to get it back.

... and I can't agree more with Antonia.

To support Antonia's words, a recent-most example of some men not stopping at anything to be in control comes from India where a husband set his wife on fire for giving birth to THEIR fifth daughter. I stress on 'their' because the somewhat logical being in me is screaming that the husband was also a party in the baby making process. Times of India reports:

A man in Jharkhand set his wife on fire after she gave birth to their fifth daughter, police said on Wednesday.

According to police, Sarita Devi, 35, a resident of Shakkarpur village on the outskirts of Jharkhand's capital Ranchi, gave birth to a girl, their fifth consecutive daughter, seven days ago. The birth of five girls in a row within a span of seven years infuriated Sarita's husband, Ketan Khalko.

Khalko on Tuesday night arrived home in an inebriated condition. He had a quarrel with Sarita on the baby girl issue.

He poured kerosene on Sarita and set her on fire. Her cries alerted the neighbours, who took her to Rajendra Institute of Medical Science (RIMS) in Ranchi. Khalko escaped from the spot.

According to doctors, Sarita's condition is serious as she has suffered over 55 per cent burn injuries.

"Sarita had already four daughters and the birth of the fifth baby girl infuriated Khalko, who wanted a boy. As my daughter gave birth to a girl, Khalko tried to kill her," said Sarita's mother, Bando Kachchap.

To add on to that, here is a video put together by http://www.stophonorkillings.com ( please note that there are some graphic images):



I won't say that I fully agree with their stance that all honor killings (or should I even call them 'honor killings') are conducted exclusively by men. It is true that majority of these killings are conducted by men and victims are mostly women but exclusively blaming the men is a step too far for me. I hold the society on the whole responsible. Some women are just as prejudiced as some men are. Instead of blaming either gender, we need to come together and work together to remove the differences that we have generated over the years. The pessimist in me is mocking me as I type this but hopefully, when and if I have a daughter, the phenomenon that media refers to as 'honor killings' would be a thing of the past.

Society? Really?

This is the response to the "adjustment" article.
Mr Dave says that he is merely "Counseling" the young bride to cope. Because society is at fault for having those attitudes.
But society is not an entity outside the people who make it. And it is social sanction that has allowed female infanticide and now female foeticide to flourish undeterred. It is alright - even allowable to toe the line? Is that what he is trying to say? Where exactly does one draw the line? Can one draw the line at all? Or is it a case of "everyone does it?". Moral relativism at a new high.
This is not about Mr Dave or his article, but a much much deeper malaise that we have- the one where we need sanction even for what is morally correct. And for opposing what is morally wrong. That is what we need to battle in our opposition to female foeticide. Not doctors, not technologies, but the fact that people use the excuse of society to carry on a most disgusting and degrading practice.

Thanks to Indian Home Maker for sending us the link:
"The link to that article is

http://epaper.timesofindia.com/Default/Client.asp?skin=pastissues2&enter=LowLevel

but you may need to type the date, (30th June 2008) of Mumbai Mirror and then go to the bottom of Page 10. "

Another singer pleads against foeticide

Hi, this is Roop. I've been away from this blog for over a month now. I was waiting for my internet to get connected at home. It still hasn't been connected. However, a link to a song video that my sister sent me forced me to search for an internet place where I can be online for a few minutes a day. I don't know how I managed to even stay away. We are doing something important here and there should be nothing that could form a barrier from our goal. Here I am now ... hoping to be consistent again. I'll try to come here to the library at least once a day until I get internet at home. I apologize for my laziness. I cannot excuse any reason - legit or not - to stay away from the blog.

The video that my sister sent:



The singer is the legendary Hans Raj Hans. I cannot say that I was particularly awed by either the lyrics or the video but it is certainly a commendable effort.

Related Videos already posted on this blog:
1. Gurdas Mann
2. Sarabjit Cheema
3. Amrinder Gill