India’s Missing Daughters

Ansh Rastogi is a student at PGDAV College, DU, a tech savvy and a UPSC aspirant, all in that order. He recently joined Safecity as a blogging intern. He writes about the menace that is Female Foeticide in this blog.

India is a country of vibrant diversity, a country where women are worshipped as goddesses in many forms like Maa Durga, Kali, Saraswati. But this is just the bright side of the coin and the other one is as dark as hell, where a newborn girl child is killed just after birth. Thanks to modern technology, they are aborted before birth after determining their gender, when they are nothing, just a foetus- unborn. They get murdered by their own parents and their only crime is being a female. It is a centuries old heinous act supported by Indian orthodox and patriarchal system which considers women nothing more than a worthless creature, without considering the fact that they too were given birth by a woman.  This has led the sex-ratio in India to be 108 males per 100 females. Although the figure is getting better day by day, she is reaching the skies in Tejas, she is doing spacewalk at ISS, she is making the most mysteries discoveries like the first photograph of a blackhole and she is managing the biggest companies on earth. She can do everything but still there are places where she is suffering from polygamy, pardah system where the list of such taboo’s prevailing through our society is endless. Even when they are grown up, the monsters of the society won’t let them live freely. The crimes like Forced prostitution, Genital mutilation, Rape, Street harassment, Sexual harassment in offices is still prevalent. The time has come when she needs to be treated equivalent to a male because there is nothing, a man can and a woman can’t. It’s time to restore the beliefs in our ancient texts, It’s time to restore the respected position of the woman in a society. It’s time to be the change, a change which changes every mindset.