Over six million Jews were killed during the holocaust. About 8, 00, 000 people were killed in the Rwandan genocide. Even today, these large-scale massacres evoke horror and condemnation across the world. But digest this: Over the last decade alone, an estimated 8 million girls have been eliminated in India. It is believed that most of them were aborted as foetuses for being the 'wrong gender'. Yet, this tragedy has not evoked the kind of outrage that a holocaust or the Rwandan genocide did.
Activists in India who have been working for decades on the issue of the girl child say that this large-scale murder of girls also qualifies as genocide - which is defined as the deliberate and systematic destruction, in whole or in part, of an ethnic, racial, religious, or national group. "It fits the definition of genocide and ought to evoke the outrage reserved for something as horrific as genocide. However, the government has hardly done anything despite the women's movement in the country flagging this problem as far back as the mid-seventies. Even after an alarm was raised following the drastic fall in child sex ratio that became evident in the 1991 census, the government has shown little interest in putting an end to this ghastly crime, " says Sabu George, whose PIL in the Supreme Court in 2000 had forced the government to take some steps towards implementing the law (brought into force in 1994) to stop sex determination and sex selective abortion.
Only Vietnam and China are the only other large countries that share India's ignominy of having such an abnormally skewed sex ratio at birth. Demographers and sociologists are unequivocal in their conclusion that this kind of an imbalance could only happen through pre-natal sex selection or aborting female foetuses.
It is a known fact that boys are slightly more likely to die in infancy than girls. To compensate, more boys are born than girls, a trend seen worldwide and for hundreds of years, which is conjectured to be nature's mechanism to ensure that there will be equal numbers of young men and women at puberty. Worldwide, the normal sex ratio at birth (SRB) is about 950 female babies per 1, 000 male babies, a ratio that has been so stable over time that it appears to be the natural order. But in India, the SRB is around 890 and in China about 875.
With China and India accounting for one-third of the world's population, their poor SRB also skews the world's SRB. Almost 70 per cent of the countries including all the African countries record SRB that is well over normal. However, India and China, along with a few other heavily populated countries such as Russia and Japan, being in the poor SRB club ensure that the SRB for the world is pulled down to just 935.
Interestingly, it is beginning to be acknowledged that in a large number of highly industrialised countries like the US, Canada, Netherlands and the Scandinavian nations, there has been a definite fall in the number of boys being born. In fact, in the two decades between 1970 and 1990, the proportion of male births went down by one whole per cent worldwide. The change is small but real and no one quite knows why and different reasons such as pollution and delayed conception are offered as possible explanations. Even with this minor change, the global SRB continues to fall thanks to girlkiller nations like China and India.
GLOBAL SEX RATIOS AT BIRTH
BELOW 900 Vietnam, India, China
APPROX 940 Russia, Germany, Australia, Japan, Canada
OVER 950 UK, US, France, Mexico, Pakistan, Brazil, Egypt
OVER 960 Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh
OVER 970 South Africa, Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Ghana, Uganda
Source: The Times Of India
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