http://ibnlive.in.com/features/femalefoeticide/3.php

Ponni is a quiet person. She doesn't say much, but doesn’t mind being interviewed with her children. Children she raises alone, because four years ago, Ponni's husband left her when she refused to kill her sixth girl child.

Ponni is a field worker and had strangled two of her girls with a wet cloth and couldn't get herself to do it the third time. "He left without giving me a thing," she says sobbing.
Ponni with her girls

NGOs feel that the Cradle Baby Scheme gives out a wrong message — that the girl child is a burden.

Ponni lives in Salem, the fifth largest city of Tamil Nadu. Her husband Sekar, a road construction worker, has remarried. He and his second wife had two girls, killed a third and then finally had a boy.

Unfortunately, Sekar sees nothing wrong in what he has done. He thinks he was being practical when he killed the children. "If I have another girl even now, I will kill her. What's the point of bringing a girl up given my financial state," says he.

It was to do away with horrifying incidents like this that the Tamil Nadu government began the Cradle Baby Scheme in 1992. According to this scheme, parents who don't want to keep their girl babies could leave them in cradles kept at government reception centers.

Salem may be one of the major textile centres in the country today but in this city nearly 60 per cent of the girls born are killed within three days of birth and the Cradle Baby Scheme is struggling for acceptance.

Most parents are afraid that the girls they've given away in the scheme will one day come back to them. And they are not the only ones who don't think too much of the scheme. Even NGOs in Salem detest the scheme - but for a different reason.

Says Arul, a volunteer with the Village Reconstruction & Development Project, "How can we be expected to promote something that teaches people to throw away their girls? I don't think the government should teach the people that the girl child is a burden."

Another reason why the NGOs do not like the scheme is because the cradle babies are never taken care of properly by the government. Every year, the Tamil Nadu government shows off the rising number of cradle babies - 621 in the year 2005.

However, rural welfare groups are quick to point out that this is not a trend to be proud of because it reinforces only one thing and that is that the people want male children. Says Rajeshwari, who works as a seamstress in Salem, "I want a boy. That would be extremely nice."

Ponni's story may have been shocking, but it is people like Rajeshwari who represent the new face of sex discrimination in Salem - sex-selective abortion. Rajeshwari had an abortion in her seventh month of pregnancy when a scan at the doctor's revealed that she was carrying a girl child.

It's clear that Salem certainly does not treat its girls as equals. Though Tamil Nadu may have been actively combating female foeticide and infanticide issues, it's high time that they re-evaluated some of their quick-fix schemes.

There are government schemes and counseling sessions to remove this mindset, but there are still people who openly admit that the girl child is such a burden that they'd rather she was never born.

Only Lakshmi (or it Laxmi) Devi can improve this as this practice appears to be prevalent in poor and lower middle class families.

Is it all that different from abortion?