SAVE THE GIRL CHILD

 The news of cruelty against baby girls are frequently on the front pages of newspapers.  To day, a baby girl of three months old died in a Bangalore Hospital. She was very cruelly beaten up by her father, ultimately to become unconscious before admitted in the hospital by the help of Police by her mother. Her young father did that against her for  not being a baby boy.

 A news report in Deccan Herald had narrated a story of a girl who miraculously escaped death though she was dumped among the hospital surgery waste after she was taken out surgically from her mother.  She was 7 months old in the pregnancy. A nurse found her alive the next day.  The girl, named Anamika, is growing now in an asylum. Her parents left the hospital as soon as the surgery was over.   The sad part is that she lost her speech and hearing in the process.

 A three year old had died in a Delhi hospital  recently fighting for life for months and she too was a victim of paternal cruelty.  Those cases were made known to the public as the news were splased in the Media  but millions of such cases are taking place  in varying degrees and modes in homes across India.

India and China rank the top in eliminating female children. The two countries together eliminate millions of children a year, says the statistics. The U.N report estimated that 200 million infant girls are ‘missing’ all over the world.

In India the reason for disenchantment for girls are rooted in social and economical reasons. In a patriarchal society like India the breadwinner of a family is male  and parents prefer male child as their old age pension. At the same time a girl child means future expenses for marriage etc with Nil return. A purely profit and loss account without any regard to love or kinship.

( The Tamil girl Prema Jayakumar of Mumbai who topped the tough C A Exam proves the worth of a daughter. She is the eldest daughter of an auto rickshaw driver, Jayakumar.  She got 10 Lakh Rupees from Tamil Nadu Government as an appreciation of her singular success.  She said her priority was to help her father who toiled to bring her up. So no one except the almighty knows where ones fortune is hidden )

   As world gets more materialistic love and kinship are pushed back and   people get self-centered. The perpetrators of the crime are not only the parents but the female in-laws also pressure or participate for the elimination. If you thought that rich and educated would not do such gruesome act, think again, they too do it, perhaps, in its fetal stage.

In China though the reasons are more or less similar, the strict one-child norm is mostly the villain. The parents think that if only one child is permitted it may as well be a male child and eliminate the female ones in the process.

The trust and expectation on a male child  have in many cases turned out  to be misplaced. The daughters are more likely to look after in the old age. 

 Though there are millions of girls who are reared up as the darlings of their parents the cruelty against even a single  girl is enough to disturb our conscience.  Wonder what those angels did to earn such a neglect ?

image from Google