Infant girls turning up in Agra trash cans!
VIJAY UPADHYAY
If you are childless, come to Agra. Who knows, you may find a baby girl lying in a trash can yearning for your loving embrace. Incredible as it may sound, infant girls are turning
In clearly the worst possible form of female infanticide, in the past month alone, about half a dozen new-born girls have been found alive in trash cans of Agra while three others have been discovered dead in sewers. Two such girls were recovered alive from the elite neighbourhood of Judge Compound, a residential colony of senior administrative officials of Agra, early this January, while one was found behind a bus-station and another in a 20-feet deep sewage drain.
These abandoned girls have been taken over by the Rajkiya Shishu Sadan in the city which is already raising 33 orphan children. After the local administration refused to give away these orphaned girls for adoption without proper verification, NGOs have come forward to provide them with a decent living in order to prevent them from falling into the hands of flesh-traders.
One such NGO - Sewa Bharti - is raising three girls who were abandoned by their parents. Talking to The Pioneer, Ashok Agarwal, president of the Braj unit of Sewa Bharti, which runs the orphanage under the aegis of Matru Chhaya Nyas, said Sewa Bharti operates 109 orphanages across the country with over 6,000 children being raised in these centres.
He said it is a very disturbing fact that over 80 per cent of these abandoned children are girls. On an average, he said, at least four to six infant girls have turned up in the trash can every month lately, while only two to three boys were abandoned by their mothers in the past year which indicates a growing practice of female foeticide in the town in the misplaced belief that the birth of a girl child means a lifelong financial burden.
Citing one such incident, Agarwal said a couple came to the orphanage a few days ago with two girls in their arms and pleaded with him to take these girls in the care of the orphanage as they could not "afford" to raise even one girl. The father of these unfortunate girls claimed he had wished for a son but he instead got two daughters; in his weak financial state he could not feed two more hungry mouths so he decided to give away these girls to the orphanage. Agarwal said most people abandon their girl-child for precisely this reason.
Fortunately, there is another face of humanity. Sunita and Pappu, childless for 18 years have claimed the infant girl who was found behind the bus-station. When contacted, Sunita said she has been childless for almost two decades and now, when she has been given a chance to show her maternal instincts, the baby's sex is immaterial.
Shakuntala, orphanage in charge, said all three girls being raised by the orphanage were left by their mothers in trash cans, almost a month after their birth. She said the orphanage shall soon offer these girls to willing couples for adoption with preference to childless couples. Talking to The Pioneer on this issue during her Agra visit, Ms Ashok Pandey, a member of the UP Commission for Women (UPCW) said this is a very serious issue which concerns the rights of the girl child as a human. Blaming the social evil of dowry for this ghoulish practice, she said most of these girls are subjected to this cruelty even before they become conscious to the world only because they are not the boy the parents "expected", a boy who would apparently bring money home, not take it away in dowry.
(UNITED NEWS NETWORK)
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