Women are the receiving end in Indian society. They are will treated or tortured at every stage. A girl child is in bondage from her very childhood. She is under constant, vigil First by the parents, then her husband and finally her own children. Not only that, she is often condemned to death even before she is born. This is called female killing in the womb itself. In ancient India the birth of a girl child was hailed as auspicious. An old Indian proverb lies down that a home without a daughter is like a body without soul.
The coming of a daughter in the house was compared with the advent of Laxmi, the Goddess of wealth and Saraswati, the Goddess of fine arts. The usual blessing of a father at the time of his daughter’s marriage was: “May you excel in learning and public speaking”. No ceremony was considered complete without presence of women. The belief was that “No hone is complete without a woman. ” The situation, however drastically changed during the Middle Ages when Idnia was subjected to frequently foreign invasions.
The invaders botty also comprised of women suffered badly, infanticide and ‘Purdah’ became prevalent. Sending a girl to school became risky. There was, therefore, sudden decline in female literacy and the position of women in society. This tradition lasting till today and the killing of fetus is started with a boom. The problem of female fetus is widespread in urban centers. With the help of new techniques it has become possible to determine the sex of the unborn baby or the fetus, and if it is found to be a girl child than, this is followed by abortion.
Clinics offering such service have come up all over the country. There are severing laws against the misuse of parental diagnostic techniques, which are meant only for detecting abnormalities in the unborn infant. The doctors, however, violate this law. Not a single case has been field so far under the law, which forbids such an unethical practice. To day, the problem is quite widespread in the northern states of Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajastan. There are pockets of Tamilnadu where killing a girl child is practiced traditionally.
The tribes, the Toda, The Kallar and the Gounder, earlier lived in war zones are facing torture of army solider. They started to kill the girl child in order to keep the population of women down and thus save them from rape by invading armies. In Rajasthan also, a girl child is looked upon as a curse because her father has to lie low before the father of boy at the time of match finding. Upon attaining puberty, a girl is considered to be a security risk, a likely source of trouble for the family’s honor and reputation. Then there are economic reasons for her killing.
She is a liability for her parents from the cradle ceremony to the marriage. There has been not let up in the dowry system, which breaks the back of the parents. She is got rid of in order to save the family properly from partition. In some communities there is a dirty superstition that is a daughter is killed, the next child will be a son. In China also, the eldest male child inherits the property look upon the male child as their protector and supporter in old age. This gender-bias leads to the killing of girl child.
The greatest tragedy is that women themselves permit the death of their daughters as mercy killing. Unwanted baby girls are often left on the road or in the maternity homes at night> This is due to the unhealthy sex before marriage or due to the husband of may died, who is the only source to take of her and her baby. This unhealthy practice has caused great imbalance in the ratio of boys and girls in several states and communities. To prevent this situation we must provide proper education and the laws, that are presently could not trap the criminal, should be strict.
So those, all the person who are engaged in this child infanticide crime, think twice before doing it. Save Girl Child An ancient Sanskrit saying says, woman is the home and the home is the basis of society. It is as we build our homes that we can build our country. If the home is inadequate—either inadequate in material goods and necessities or inadequate in the sort of friendly, loving atmosphere that every child needs to grow and develop—then that country cannot have harmony and no country which does not have harmony can grow in any direction at all.
That is why women’s education is almost more important than the education of boys and men. We—and by “we” I do not mean only we in India but the entire world—have neglected women education. It is fairly recent. Of course, not to you but when I was a child, the story of early days of women’s education in England, for instance, was very current. Everybody remembered what had happened in the early days. Now, we have got education and there is a debate all over the ountry whether this education is adequate to the needs of society or the needs of our young people. I am one of those who always believe that education needs a thorough overhauling. But at the same time, I think that everything in our education is not bad, that even the present education has produced very fine men and women, specially scientists and experts in different fields, who are in great demand all over the world and even in the most affluent countries.
Many of our young people leave us and go abroad because they get higher salaries; they get better conditions of work. Our country is a very rich country. It is rich in culture, it is rich in many old traditions—old and even modern tradition. Of course, it has a lot of bad things too and some of the bad things are in the society—superstition, which has grown over the years and which sometimes clouds over the shining brightness of ancient thought and values, eternal values. Then, of course, there is the physical poverty of large numbers of our people
