WHILE sex ratio at birth (SRB — number of girls per 1,000 boys) below 800 was recorded in 42 villages of Rohtak district in 2022, this worrisome trend spread to 54 villages last year. Notably, Rohtak is just one of the 12 districts to show negative outcomes in the SRB data. The state SRB slipped from 917 in 2022 to 906 in June 2023, punching holes in Haryana’s tall claims about the success of its flagship Beti Bachao Beti Padhao programme. In 2022, Kurukshetra, too, had witnessed alarmingly skewed gender ratio at birth, with 20 of its villages recording SRB of less than 400, leading to an overall drop in the district figure from 921 in 2021 to 893 in 2022.

The state of affairs is a sad reflection on society’s continued preference for boys and a total disregard for the ill-effects of gender imbalance on future generations. Young parents are apparently going to great lengths to get pre-natal sex determination tests done in Haryana and neighbouring Punjab and UP, risking getting caught by the law. This craze has ensured that the racket of touts, nurses, doctors and unscrupulous medical centres, which detect and abort female foetuses, continues to flourish.

It will not be wrong to surmise that at the root of this thriving malpractice is the inability of the authorities to punish the culprits surely and swiftly. The state must introspect why despite the raids on suspects and monitoring of pregnant women by the health authorities, unborn girls are being killed, making a mockery of the strict Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act. It remains to be seen if the Rs 1 lakh reward announced by the Rohtak administration for providing information about those violating the law bears fruit.