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.

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.

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.