Eight month- old Nandini is one of the few lucky ones. In this remote village of northern Punjab, where girls are killed before birth or considered a curse, Nandini’s parents chose “life” for her.

Punjab has the country’s lowest sex ratio with 798 girls for every thousand boys. A study by the British medical journal Lancet this yearsaid India may have lost 10 million “unborn” girls over the past 20 years, though experts at home put it at 5 million.
But Jalahmajra is an aberration. It has reversed the gender imbalance. With an average of 1,020 girls every 1,000, the village is at the forefront of the campaign against “girl child slaughter”. The Punjab government which has announced a cash award to any village, which reported more girls than boys last year, awarded the village Rs 3 crore (6,542 US dollars).

Residents attribute the turnaround to a sustained campaign by Kishan kumar, a senior administrative official, in- charge of Nawanshahr district, where the village is located. It took a long time to change the popular mindsets. Says head teacher of a local teacher of a local school, “ earlier when a girl was born, peopleon the streets would ask the mother: Didn’t you undergo a gender test? That has stopped.

The Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act bans tests to dete4rmine the sex of an unborn child but the practice is a multimillion-dollar business countrywide. :There is a girl in every house in our village,” says Nandini’s beaming24- year old mother Sangeeta Sidhu. She and her mason husband Gurdeep now have a “complete” pair of a son and a daughter. The couple wants to educate Nandini and is not worried about dowry – the primary reason behind infanticide. Village head said he would build a “guesthouse” for wedding so that cost could be cut.Parents often have to borrow heavily to marry off their daughters.

Another 70 villages in Nawanshahr are also close to achieving the national coverage of 927, says district magistrate Kumar, who launched an anti- abortion crusade last year. Kumar maintains computerized records of all pregnant women in his district of 600,000 people. Next on his agenda are sting operations on doctors carrying out illegal abortion.

Source: Hindustan Times June 27/06