Did you know India is the most dangerous place in the world to be a baby girl? That a girl child aged between 1 and 5 years in our country is 75% more likely to die than a boy? That we have the world's worst gender differential in child mortality?
The urgency and helplessness of the situation did not hit me, till I walked into this hospital in Noida, into the ward where a 3-day-old abandoned girl child had been brought in. She was crying bitterly. Doctors said she missed her mother's warmth and that it's a miracle that she did not come to any harm on the busy bus stop where she was left. Vulnerable, beautiful, condemned as unwanted right from the womb.
The nurses taking care of her in the ICU told NDTV that offers had already been pouring in to adopt her, but procedures will have to be followed. ''The police got the baby to the hospital. The baby is healthy and is a girl. She was found on the road.'' The hospital staff have pooled in some money to buy her clothes and milk.
In backward areas of Rajasthan or Madhya Pradesh this abandonment takes on an edge.
All of three, Anita, with severe malnourishment was admitted to Jhabua District Hospital in Madhya Pradesh on April 2. In the days that followed her parents and grandmother disappeared. This is not an uncommon case for a state where 60% children are malnourished, and an affected girl child becomes the least preferred.
Her parents were migrant labourers, who are itinerant by nature and possibly hardened by acute poverty. Children, especially girls, are also considered a liability at construction sites, where there are no security nets or onsite daycare facilities for labourers' families.
Madhya Pradesh's flagship schemes, like the Beti Bachao Abhiyaan, and the Ladli Lakshmi Yojya, that have been adopted at the national level, miserably fail before the girl child's reality: Part bias, part mindset, part poverty.
Perhaps the case in Rajasthan is the worst. In a hospital in Jodhpur, on March 25, a baby girl was born.
The hospital staff swapped her with a baby boy by mistake and since then, the mother who gave her birth, refused to accept her.
A custody battle broke out as neither family wanted the girl. The High Court had to intervene, conduct a DNA test, reunite her with the mother, who has been ordered to breastfeed her.
This is how these three baby girls have begun their life, holding up a mirror to the level of rejection girls' face in our god, or rather goddess-fearing country.