The Indian government has announced it will pay poor families the equivalent of nearly 3.000 US dollar (15.000 DKR – en stor sum i et u-land) to bring up their girl children, BBC reports Wednesday.
The scheme is hoped to discourage the widespread practice of aborting female foetuses (fostre), which has led to a gender imbalance in parts of the country.
India outlawed gender selection and selective abortion in 1994, but the practice still continues. British medical journal Lancet says 10 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the past 20 years.
Under the new scheme, poor families in seven Indian states will be paid cash at the birth of a daughter and again at different stages throughout her childhood up to the age of 18 years.
Womens rights activist Vijayalaxmi Nanda welcomed the scheme, but said that the “problem of sex selective abortion is mostly with those who are above the poverty line. I think it is the urban, the middle class, the prosperous who are doing so”.
– The pressures are myriad … a kind of cultural preference, like dowry (medgift), like female right to inheritance, to land, to property and to other things. These are the basic areas that need to be looked at, Ms Nanda said.
Female infanticide occurs in 80 per cent of Indias states andt the worst-affected include the wealthiest areas.
