Divya Jain Programme Officer Datamation Foundation divya@datamationfoundation.org

This initiative is under the ‘Save the Girl Child Campaign’, which uses ICTs to generate and record complaints against members of the medical community indulging in selective sex determination tests and selective abortion of female foetuses.

Background
The practice of Female Foeticide or the selection of the sex of the foetus is a combination of personal choices, family issues, social, ethical, medical and even legal reasons. Within all these reasons, technology has also come to play an increasingly crucial role. Sex Determination Techniques, that is, Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PNDT) are used for predicting the sex of an unborn offspring after conception preferably in the first four months of pregnancy. From foetoscopy, ultrasonography, chorionic villus biopsy, to foetal blood sampling, genetic technology has evolved over the last three decades.

The Indian picture
Women are both worshipped and accorded a highly revered status in our Indian society. Yet the progressive technological developments cannot hide one of the worst impending ‘gender’ crisis the society is facing – ‘the rapid depletion of women population’. In 1975, amniocentesis techniques for detecting foetal abnormalities began to be developed in India, at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi. Soon it was known that these tests could detect the sex of the foetus also, and doctors at the Institute noted that most of the 11,000 couples who volunteered for the test wanted to know the sex of the child and were not interested in the possibility of genetic abnormalities. Both the availability and affordability of such techniques after penetrating in the urban communities, are also making inroads in the rural areas shown by the proliferating ultra-sound scan machines in several hundred small towns across the country aiding in sex determination.

Pointers to female foeticide
Declining sex ratio in various parts of the country, specifically the ratio of the girl child, compared to the boys in the age group of 0-6 years has been a cause of deep concern to Government of India. During the last ten years (since the last census from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001), this ratio has declined significantly in almost all parts of the country, barring Kerala, and notably in – Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Punjab (one of the worst sex ratios in the country), Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Datamation Foundation’s extensive research in this regard concluded that selective sex tests and abortions are the main reasons for the abandonment of the female foetus.

Interventionist role of ICTs
Today, information technology has changed the communication paradigm, making it no longer difficult to reach a large number of people more or less at the same time; and that too enable them to respond, interact as well as obtain a copy of the information within a low-cost. Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) apart from sensitising people against this heinous crime and helping them in general to change their opinion about a girl child, can also play a highly interventionist role by proactively pursuing cases against erring doctors, booking them under the law of the land. 


An important tool helping the Government of India to accomplish their cherished goal of all together stopping female foeticide is a website solely dedicated to Female Foeticide- www.indiafemalefoeticide.org set up by Datamation Foundation Charitable Trust. Nalini Abraham of Plan International inspired to start this portal and since then has been constantly providing technical inputs. Sarita Sharma from the Foundation with her rich community experience effectively leads the project. This major ICT based campaigning and advocacy programme is to help prevent occurrences of selective sex tests and selective abortions of the female fetuses in India.