In some parts of India, a girl’s life ends before it begins. The technology that was developed to detect fetal abnormalities, ultrasound, amniocentesis, was repurposed, quietly and lethally to identify female fetuses and terminate them. By the time of the 2001 census, India’s child sex ratio had fallen to 927 girls per thousand boys, down from 945 in 1991. In some states , Haryana, Punjab, Delhi , the figures were far worse. Millions of girls were simply missing from the population.
Female foeticide is not a phenomenon of poverty alone. Studies have shown that the practice is often more prevalent among the educated and economically secure, who have both access to technology and the financial means to pay for repeated procedures. The dowry system , the expectation that a bride’s family will transfer wealth to the groom’s, frames daughters as a financial burden rather than a blessing. In a society where sons carry the family name, perform last rites, and are expected to support aging parents, a daughter is too often seen as someone else’s investment.
India was not passive in the face of this crisis. The Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PNDT) Act of 1994, strengthened in 2003 to become the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act, prohibits sex determination of fetuses and imposes criminal penalties on medical practitioners and parents who violate it. Clinics must register, maintain records, and display prominent notices that sex disclosure is prohibited. A conviction can mean three years in prison and a fine of fifty thousand rupees.
The Supreme Court intervened forcefully in 2001 through a landmark PIL filed by Dr. Sabu George, directing all state governments to implement the PNDT Act strictly. But implementation has remained patchy. Of 35 states and union territories studied in 2006, 22 had not registered a single case of violation under the Act. The industry of sex-selective abortion, estimated by UNICEF to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars , operates through codes, informal networks, and the complicity of a medical establishment that finds it profitable.
What law alone cannot change is the social soil in which this practice grows. The devaluation of women, their exclusion from inheritance, their subordination in marriage, their invisibility in public life , feeds the preference for sons at its root. Communities in Kerala and the Northeast, where women have stronger property rights and social standing, consistently show healthier sex ratios. The lesson is clear: legal prohibition is necessary but not sufficient. Only when daughters are as welcomed, as educated, and as economically empowered as sons, only then will India’s missing girls begin to come home.
