Fatal Test

A Maharashtra legislature panel's suggestion to make sex-determination test mandatory could derail decades of efforts to protect the rights of women and the safety of the girl child.

- Varsha Torgalkar

IT'S NOT just bewildering but worrying. Over a month has passed since the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) submitted a report in the state assembly, recommending that prenatal sex determination test should be made mandatory. Such a test is currently illegal under the PreConception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act of 1994 that aims to prevent female foeticide. PAC’s report has raised a furore among social activists, academics and health rights experts, with several of them demanding its immediate rejection. But the Maharashtra government remains tight-lipped about it.

This is worrying because Maharashtra was one of the first states to recognise the problem of sex-selective abortion way back in the 1980s and became the pioneer in implementing the PCPNDT Act. But of late, child sex ratio in the state has been declining—census reports show that the number of girl children in the state declined from 913 for every 1,000 boys to 894 between 2001 and 2011, and is much below the national average of 919. A recent incident highlights what could be the reason for the declining trend. In March, just a few days before PAC made its recommendations public, the state police busted a sex-selective abortion racket at Mhaisal village in western Maharashtra’s Sangli district, and found 19 aborted foetuses dumped near a hospital.