First jail term in female foeticide law

A doctor and his assistant were sentenced to two years in prison and a Rs 5000-fine in Palwal, Haryana. Punjab has seen one conviction to date — Dr Neelam Kohli of Ropar district was fined Rs 1,000 by the Kharar court in July, 2003.

This case followed the typical route: it was filed in 2001 when Dr Anil Sabsani was caught red-handed by members of the Appropriate Authority set up under the Act in every state. The four-member authority had a decoy customer and made audio and video recordings of the doctor’s interaction with the customer in which he identified the sex of the foetus as female and assured the patient that “it would be taken care of.”

As is the trend, all private witnesses turned hostile but the recordings made the difference as the case was heard by a lower court in Palwal.

He has four others complaints pending in local courts. ‘‘The most important thing is to get an early judgment. When it takes five years for a case to be decided, we get completely demoralised,’’ said Agarwal.

‘‘The lacunae in the PNDT Act is the implementation rather than the Act itself,’’ said Radhika Kaul Batra, senior advocacy officer, United Nations Population Fund.

According to a recent Indo-Canadian study, about half-a-million unborn girl children are aborted every year in India. Estimates by the Indian Medical Association put the figure of female foetuses aborted in India each year at an even more alarming five million.

The PNDT Act provides that no genetic counselling centre, laboratory or clinic shall employ pre-natal diagnostic techniques, including ultra-sonography, for the purpose of determining the sex of the foetus.

Any violation of the provisions of the Act is punishable with imprisonment of a term which may extend to five years, and a fine.

Census 2001 figures indicate that the practice could be rampant at least in Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh, Chandigarh and Delhi with the ratio falling in some states to as low as 800 girls to 1000 boys.

Responding to a PIL, the...