Originally published on July 6, 2007: Message to India: Thou Shalt Not Kill. Infant Girls Included.
HYDERABAD, India — A newborn baby girl was buried alive by her family in southern India on Thursday but was rescued when a farmer saw the baby's hand sticking out of the ground, officials said.
The two-day old baby, who had apparently never been fed, was recovering in a hospital in the Mahbubnagar district of Andhra Pradesh, said Charu Sinha, district superintendent of police.
Indian society has long favored boys, who do not require the enormous dowry payments that bankrupt many poor families when their daughters marry.
The baby was buried by her maternal grandfather, Abdul Raheem, and his brother, Abdul Rasheed, with the consent of the baby's mother, Mehrunnisa, near Otkur village, about 150 kilometers south of the state capital of Hyderabad, Sinha said.
The police arrested the two men and will charge them with attempted murder, Sinha added. Mehrunnisa, who only goes by one name, will be charged as an accomplice.
This is nothing new for India, where being born female can get you killed.
Some 10 million girls have been killed by their parents in India in the past 20 years, either before birth or shortly after. (Warning: the following excerpt contains upsetting details about how newborn girls are killed.)
A UNICEF report released this week said 7,000 fewer girls are born in the country every day than the global average would suggest, largely because female foetuses are aborted after sex determination tests but also through murder of new borns.
"It's shocking figures and we are in a national crisis if you ask me," Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury told Reuters.
Girls are seen as liabilities by many Indians, especially because of the banned but rampant practice of dowry, where the bride's parents pay cash and goods to the groom's family.
Men are also seen as bread-winners while social prejudices deny women opportunities for education and jobs.
"Today, we have the odd distinction of having lost 10 million girl children in the past 20 years," Chowdhury told a seminar in Delhi University.
"Who has killed these girl children? Their own parents."
In some states, the minister said, newborn girls have been killed by pouring sand or tobacco juice into their nostrils.
"The minute the child is born and she opens her mouth to cry, they put sand into her mouth and her nostrils so she chokes and dies," Chowdhury said, referring to cases in the western desert state of Rajasthan.
"They bury infants into pots alive and bury the pots. They put tobacco into her mouth. They hang them upside down like a bunch of flowers to dry," she said.
"We have more passion for tigers of this country. We have people fighting for stray dogs on the road. But you have a whole society that ruthlessly hunts down girl children."
According to the 2001 census, the national sex ratio was 933 girls to 1,000 boys, while in the worst-affected northern state of Punjab, it was 798 girls to 1,000 boys.
The ratio has fallen since 1991, due to the availability of ultrasound sex-determination tests.
Although these are illegal they are still widely available and often lead to abortion of girl foetuses.
Chowdhury said the fall in the number of females had cost one percent of India's GDP and created shortages of girls in some states like Haryana, where in one case four brothers had to marry one woman.
By the way, widows in India don't fare very well either.
Is there any bright spot in this story?
Only this. That someone cared enough to save this baby out of the millions who have been killed. An Indian farmer named Ram Kumar noticed the baby's hand in a field. He and other villagers rushed the baby to a hospital.
A tiny ray of hope shines in a vast darkness.
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