Becky Blab

Dr Meera Patodia, a gynaecologist of the Meera Hospital in the city has been charged with conducting an abortion without the consent of the mother in connivance with her in-laws.

The victim Renu Khediya in her complaint to the Mahila police station (East) on May 5 2006 had charged her husband Bhupendra Singh and in-laws Rahuraj Singh, Manohar Kaur and sister-in-law Anita of dowry harassment under Sections 498A and 406 of IPC for cruelty and dowry harassment. She said her in-laws took her to hospital surreptitiously and charged the doctor with conniving with her in-laws in carrying out the inhuman act.

In my own city of Jaipur, a case of forced abortion. I wonder how the procedure could have been performed though, without the patient being aware. I can hardly imagine what that would have been like. The article doesn’t mention it, but it must have been a case of sex-selective abortion (i.e. female foeticide). Rajasthan is notorious for women’s limited reproductive rights, and still has a very high rate of population growth.

The BBC has an in-depth piece on sex-selective abortion, and gender bias in India, with a short video clip from the film that shows tonight at 7:30pm.

What would you do if your husband’s family did not want you to have daughters - and insisted you took steps to make sure it did not happen?

Would you walk out or would you stay on and take a chance?

What if the bias against girls is reflected across society? Would that mean you could not make it on your own?

Vaijanti is an Indian woman who says she faces this dilemma.

Vaijanti has taken her husband to court, saying he and his family insisted that she have an abortion because a scan showed she was expecting a girl.

Having already had one daughter, she says the pressure to abort the second child was intense.

So Vaijanti moved out of the marital home and now lives apart from her husband - with her two girls.

As Vaijanti had never travelled beyond Agra, director Nupur Basu took her on a whistle-stop tour of India.

‘Grave situation’

We wanted to make this film after a leading development expert, Kevin Watkins, suggested India had a curiously ambivalent role in the globalisation debate.

Its booming economy is cause for hope, and the government is clearly concerned about both gender and economic inequality.

But if huge swathes of the populace do not share the increasing wealth, the whole Indian model of development may be called into question.