The UPA has chosen to ride on the memories of India’s first woman prime minister in declaring January 24 as the girl child day. Indira Gandhi had first taken over as PM on January 24, 1966.

Women and child development joint secretary Kiran Chadha said the decision was taken by the Union Cabinet recently. “We found that girl child day is celebrated on different days by different countries. The Cabinet made the final decision,” she said.

The ministry will use the opportunity to launch a media campaign focusing on problems of foeticide, domestic violence and malnutrition.

Girl child day will be formally announced by WCD minister Renuka Choudhary on January 19. Along with the declaration, the ministry will also launch a campaign to create awareness about female foeticide, domestic violence and malnutrition in women and children.

This campaign has already begun unofficially in Jaipur it seems. At Maharani College there was recently a conference on female foeticide conducted by Dr. Meeta Singh, the torchbearer for girl-child rights in Rajasthan, and headed IFES’ Dignity of the Girl Child program here. See this article, ‘Saving the girl child‘:

FOR the last decade now policy planners and lay people including women have been aware of the steep decline in the sex ratio. Misuse of medical technology has made the elimination of the female foetus far easier even as son preference as a value has further strengthened with the use of new reproductive technologies. The problem of sex determination, sex pre-selection and/or sex-selective abortion is rooted in the devalued status of women and it goes without saying that this needs to be addressed uppermost.

The Washington Post had an in-depth piece on Indian women’s status. It starts off discussing ‘eve-teasing’, i.e. harrassment, but then delves into the whole range of issues from dowry to sex-selective abortion:

For India’s middle-class urban women, the past decade has brought unprecedented opportunities to advance in a social order long dominated by men. But a powerful male backlash has accompanied the women’s revolution, an upwelling of resentment that has expressed itself in sexual violence and harassment.

At the same time, however, the number of reported instances of domestic violence, rape and dowry killings is spiking in South Asian cities, according to women’s groups, demographers and sociologists.

Violence against women is the fastest-growing crime in India, a recent study concluded. Every 26 minutes a woman is molested, every 34 minutes a rape takes place, and every 43 minutes a woman is kidnapped, according to the Home Ministry’s National Crime Records Bureau.

Novellist and commentator Shobhaa De is quoted as saying:

“The latest statistics are terrifying. And it clearly points to male rage. Underneath our incredible social change, the Indian male is experiencing nothing short of a psychological frenzy.”

The article highlights the Smile Foundation for its attempts to address the issues through “self-respect and self-esteem sessions” and street theater.

It’s worth noting that while India ranks fifth highest in reported rapes, the United States ranks highest in the world. Yet I don’t think an article discussing gender dynamics in the US is likely to be covered by the WashPo in a similar manner.

This is a heartening story from the front page, to do away with all the stories of sex-selection and missing girls in Rajasthan:

Benefactors wrote a new chapter in the history of the state infamous for female infanticides, when they saved the life of a seven-month-old baby girl. Yogita was brought back from the brink of death after ‘Bhamashahs’ – as good samaritans are known here – pooled in the required funds for her surgery.

Born with a rare disease – transposition of great arteries with a defect in the right ventricle – doctors had put Yogita’s life to just a few days. For her father Vinod Bhoi, who works as a peon with a cloth merchant in Padra village of Dungarpur district, funding the expensive cardiac surgery was next to impossible.

It was an initiative taken by the Dungarpur collector Neeraj Kumar Pawan which changed the way things stood for Yogita. Contributions flooded in, mostly from local benefactors, and Yogita underwent the Rs 5 lakh “arterial switch” surgery at Delhi’s Escorts Hospital on July 17.

Interesting, though, that in the photo the mother’s face is blocked out by who I imagine to be the collector. Note also that the administration will also cover her future treatment and education.

I wonder why the collector decided to take the initiative. Regardless of the reasons (let’s hope it wasn’t to boost his reputation), the girl’s life has been saved and that speaks for itself. The cynic in me wants to believe that it’s just a publicity stunt; after all, how many girls are not so lucky? Yet the optimist is appreciative that at least one more girl has made it this far.