Endangered species?
Not long after she was born, a newborn girl was strangled to death and dumped in a garbage bin at the Mapusa Municipal Market late on Friday night. Possibly born to a desperate unwed mother, police say no culprit could be traced. But, had it been a boy instead of a girl, would this child have met the same fate?
Goa may have the highest per capital income, the highest health indices, and be among the more ‘educated’ states in India, but it hides a dark secret. The female-to-male sex ratio is slipping by the year. If this was merely the overall sex ratio, it would be easy to say it is caused by in-migration to this state.
But we are talking about children born in Goa – the 0-to-6 age group – which has little to do with migration. The sex ratio in this critical age group fell from 964 (girls to every 1,000 boys) in the 1991 census to 938 in the 2001 census (the next census will be this year). It is a drastic decrease of 26 girls to every 1,000 boys, not only much higher than the national average of 18, but huge considering that the 1981 Goa census had a ratio of 965. In terms of the country as a whole, only Punjab, Haryana, Chandigarh, Delhi, Gujarat, HP, Uttarakhand, Maharashtra (all states notorious for female infanticide) and Nagaland showed greater declines. Even supposedly ‘backward’ states like UP, MP and Bihar showed lesser declines. In terms of the overall sex ratio in this vital group, Goa ranked a poor 23rd out of the 35 states and union territories existing then.
But in the last 10 years, the situation seems to have worsened further. Figures cited at a recent seminar on ‘Falling Sex Ratio and the Girl Child’ at the International Centre, Goa, attributed to the Directorate of Health Services, say the sex ratio in the 0-to-6 age group declined to 930 females to every 1,000 males in 2008, and to 925 females to every 1,000 males in 2009. Though overall the ratio is worse in Goa’s cities than in its villages, there are two villages in North Goa and three villages in South Goa that do not have a single girl child today!
Some speakers at the seminar attributed this drastically falling ratio to a ‘son preference’, where only those who have a girl opt for further children, while those who have a boy prefer a single-child family. There may be some truth to this, because the state’s fertility rate has been assessed at just 1.71 children per family; not only the lowest in India, but lesser than the USA and many European countries. It does suggest that more and more families are opting for a single child.
But others attributed more sinister reasons to Goa’s declining sex ratio – the selective abortion of female foetuses using prenatal diagnostic technologies like Amniocentesis or Ultrasound Scans, despite their use being banned for sex determination. If this is true, then a large number of female foetuses are being deliberately aborted in pursuance of son preference.
The Goa government – especially the Health Department – needs to take urgent cognisance of this trend and take measures to reverse it. Special schemes in states like Delhi and Madhya Pradesh, in which parents of a girl child are granted financial assistance for her initial upkeep and education, have done wonders to reverse the decline in the number of girls being born. The Goa government needs to look at them carefully, and develop schemes of its own.
Otherwise, the state has a dire future. In many parts of Haryana, girls have to be ‘imported’ from other states for men of marriageable age. In other villages, one woman marries two men. Is that what we want to happen in Goa?
