But legal instruments are inherently limited. They do not by themselves immediately effect changes in attitudes and beliefs, neither do they address the deeply felt need for male children within Indian society. Additionally, laws lag behind rapid advances in medical technology. Today, ‘emergency contraceptive pills’ are being advertised on television. Tomorrow, there could be a product that allows a woman to learn the sex of the foetus through a simple urine test, who knows? Where does that leave the present monitoring and regulatory regime?

This suggests that there is no escape from the long, hard grind of making women more equal within Indian society. Coercion, by its very nature, is limited and will be increasingly less effective as medical technologies evolve. The coercive, therefore, needs to get translated into the consensual. In fact, even in places where declining sex ratios have been checked today, as in some pockets of Haryana and Punjab, the legal recourse was just one of many social initiatives that focused on raising the profile of daughters. We still need the regulatory systems without doubt, given the scale of the problem, but just one film like Chak de India, which destroyed in the course of three hours the perception that “londiyan belan ghumati hain” (girls are meant to wield rolling pins), can potentially do more for the country’s sex ratio than interminable meetings of ‘appropriate authorities’.