With child sex ratio slipping fast, the Supreme Court asked the States if some “incentives” can be announced for families who “respect and honour” the girl child in a bid to the draw society away from the evil of female foeticide.
“A female child has as much right to live on the face of the earth as any other. Nobody is taking this up as an issue... This issue affects the human race,” Justice Dipak Misra observed on Tuesday.
The Bench, also comprising Justice U.U. Lalit, asked the State governments to wake up and not view female foeticide as a “social inevitability”.
It directed the States to give suggestions for “some incentives that can be given to the family who show respect and honour for the girl child and give birth to girl child so that the sex ratio is improved.”
The court was alarmed at the prevailing child sex ratio in Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Delhi despite these governments assuring that “all possible steps” were taken.
For instance, the court noted how Uttar Pradesh, when asked to provide the latest status on child sex ratio, produced the Census 2011 chart. The Bench said U.P’s affidavit was an “apology” for one. In its defence, the U.P. State counsel pointed to an ‘annual health survey’ to suggest that sex ratio at birth in the State had improved from 904:1000 in 2010-11 to 921:1000 in 2012-13. But when the court asked for the source of the survey’s data, counsel was unable to respond.
Haryana’s affidavit showed that sex ratio at birth till June 2014 averaged 806:1000 in Rewari district, 839:1000 in Gurgaon and 890:1000 in Faridabad. Senior advocate Colin Gonsalves, counsel for NGO Voluntary Health Association Punjab, which filed the PIL, submitted that the “whole of Haryana was in the red zone”.
The affidavits were in response to the court seeking up-to-date data on steps taken to curb female foeticide. The PIL had alleged that sex determination continued with the help of medical clinics despite the setting up of the National Inspection and Monitoring Committee (NIMC) under the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, 1994.
