Earlier this year, in a ceremony conducted in Gujarat’s Kudasan village, 50 couples from Gujarat’s influential Patel community pledged that they would not resort to female foeticide. In Jhunjhunu, when they once asked,”Why water a plant in the neighbour’s garden?”, they now say that “if there is one girl in the house, the father is like a king”. In February, among the resolutions that were passed at the World Sikh Heritage meet in Fatehgarh Sahib town, there was one that condemned female foeticide and enjoined every Sikh to shun such evil practices. Many ultrasound clinics in Batinda now have notices announcing that they do not conduct sex-determination tests. In Satara, there are groups now conducting sting operations on radiologists and doctors practicing sex selections techniques, and the Punjab health department offers Rs 5,000 to any pregnant woman willing to act as a decoy and expose clinics where sex determination tests are done.

Thirty years after a study conducted by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, first revealed that Indian couples were strongly motivated to seek medical interventions that ensure male progeny, are we seeing indications of a course correction? Some demographers have argued that the decline in the female-male sex ratio will stabilise at some point as girl children become more scarce and begin to get more valued within society. Is the country actually moving towards such a tipping point?

Well, you know what they say about optimists being people who have not got around to reading the morning papers. The morning papers continue to indicate that skewed sex ratios remain very much a part of our reality, with even the so-called progressive states like Kerala jumping on to the ultrasound bandwagon. Satish Balram Agnihotri in his work, Sex Ratio Patterns in the Indian Population (Sage), observes that the optimists betray a “mechanical application of the demand and supply theory” by assuming that grooms and brides are undifferentiated products in an unsegmented market. He points out that, in reality, the system is open and brides can be “imported”. This is already happening of course, as the strange “marriages” Womenless Haryana cobbles together by shopping for women from West Bengal and Orissa.

Agnihotri’s research leads him to conclude that the devaluation of the girl child in India will continue and that sex ratio decline is slowly consolidating into a serious sex ratio imbalance. He cites historical reasons why this process is so difficult to reverse, arguing that the dominant Indo-Aryan attitude to daughters has been shaped by three decisive factors: one, the use of iron for both the plough and sword; two, the cultivation of wheat which requires much less participation of women in agriculture; and, three, the need for expertise in warfare, involving horse-riding and chariotry. Getting the ethnographic underpinnings of the phenomenon right is a useful exercise because it explains social behaviour at various levels of society.

Certainly, one of the reasons why the issue has proved so intractable is that it is located in the private sphere of the family and the individual. Addressing the public consequences of private behaviour, which comes under the rubric of “family matters”, has always been a notoriously difficult proposition. Our continuing failure to address issues of dowry, domestic violence and rape — despite legislation, despite concerted social action, despite media focus — illustrates this eloquently. The family as traditionally served to naturalise socially dominant concepts and precepts, like the construction of wives and mothers as being duty-bound to further family status. Giving birth to sons and rearing them into manhood form part of that obligation.

But while the family is believed to be the great engine driving social behaviour, there is the question of individual choices too that needs consideration. The recent Lancet study which reported that India has lost 10 million girls over the last two decades, had another nugget that went largely unnoticed. It pointed out that women with higher levels of education — Class X and beyond — report double the number of missing girls, as compared to illiterate mothers. This finding, incidentally, goes against the trend cited in the National Family Health Survey-2 (1998-99), which suggested that the preference for sons is relatively weak among women with more education and whose husbands have more education.

If the Lancet finding is true, it leads us to a difficult question. What if aware, literate Indian women, who are not necessarily influenced by their families, consciously seek to give birth to male children by exercising their right to abortion? Here we confront one of the biggest conundrums in this debate: a woman’s right to abortion — a crucial right that has been the centerpiece of many a feminist struggle the world over — militates against the right of the girl child to exist, which is again a crucial social and feminist concern. How do we reconcile these two rights? Or, more to the point, is it possible to reconcile these two rights? Incidentally, the question was raised by feminist scholar, Zarina Bhatta, during a public conversation between Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum last month. Both the Nobel laureate and internationally renowned professor of ethics found it difficult to come up with a neat answer to it.

Since the socially desirable does not translate seamlessly into the personally desirable we would, at some point, have to grapple with the issue of personal choice. Obviously change cannot be forced at the personal level, and laws can only go so far. All we can do is attempt to change the factors that dictate such a choice by working to improve the social status accorded to our daughters, through assured schooling, healthcare, employment oppportunities, and substantive legal equality. But even as we do this, we would need to continue to monitor and punish medical personnel who seek to thrive on one of the most pernicious forms of hate crimes known to modern Indian society — the hate crime called female foeticide.