Silent demonstration in Gwalior

Gwalior, Feb 20 : Hundreds of people gathered on the streets of Gwalior on Thursday to take part in a silent demonstration against female infanticide and foeticide. Holding banners with the slogans 'Save Daughters' and their mouths masked by a cloth to signify the silenced voice of the girl child, both men and women activists held hands to form a long human chain and stood in solidarity as a part of this rally. Vijay Gupta, Secretary of the Centre for Integrated Development, blamed an archaic mentality still rife in modern-day India for such trends to prevail in the society.

"In India the population of girls has been decreasing. In Madhya Pradesh, the situation is worse than the statistics on India as a whole. In Gwalior, the mentality is still of the past. India's average is 945 girls. In Gwalior there are 888 girls to every 1000 boys. The population is decreasing. Women get ultrasounds done and then have an abortion if they are expecting a girl. They don't want to have the girls, they don't want to let them live," Dr Gupta said.

According to the Indian government, 10 million girls have been killed, either before or immediately after birth, by their parents over the past couple of decades despite a law that the government enacted that bans scan tests forecasting the sex of the baby in the womb.n 1991, there were 888 females to every 1000 males in Gwalior before the figure fell to 841 in 2001.

The government has however bolstered its efforts, on a state and national level, to fight the stigma of giving birth to a girl, resulting in the number of females rising back to 888.