How Haryana Saved Its Girls

The relentless campaign by the Khattar government against female foeticide has paid off.

- Asit Jolly

ON FEBRUARY 3, DOCTORS in the emergency room at the Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences (PGIMS) in Rohtak were horrified to receive a profusely bleeding young woman unaccompanied by relatives or attendants. She had evidently undergone an ‘induced abortion’ at a highly advanced stage of pregnancy. “She has a ruptured uterus and diaphragm, causing the large intestine to protrude into the vagina,” the attending surgeon in the emergency room said, alerting chief medical officer (CMO) Sanjay Dahiya.

Acting with alacrity, a team of police and health officials, despite the scanty information, managed to track down the victim’s mother-in-law and brother-in-law in Karoon, a village in the neighbouring Jind district. In less than a week, the other culprits were arrested—the owner of the private clinic where the abortion was carried out and the nurse who did it. Police recovered the remains of the aborted female foetus from fields outside Jind’s Chaudhary Ranbir Singh University.

The Jind case, which is in the process of being committed to a court trial, is the most recent in what has been a concerted crackdown by the Manohar Lal Khattar government to lay down the law against female foeticide. Consider this: since Prime Minister Narendra Modi selected Panipat to launch the Centre’s Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) programme on January 22, 2015, the Khattar government has registered 584 first information reports (FIRs) under provisions of the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PC-PNDT) Act and The Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act. That’s more than the total cases registered in all the other states during the period. Over 1,000 suspected offenders, who include doctors, nurses, quacks, touts, godmen and even patients and their family members, have been arrested and booked.