Have no girls been born in 132 villages in India?
BBC: When reports emerged earlier this week that no girl had been born in 132 villages in the small Himalayan state of Uttarakhand in the last three months, it sparked panic and prompted a government investigation into the matter.
The “no girl villages” were reported from Uttarkashi, where some 400,000 people live in 550 villages and five towns. Much of the terrain is hilly and remote. In a country which has been grappling with an awful sex-ratio imbalance – largely because of illegal sex-selection abortions – the news has caused considerable anguish.
Except that this might not be completely true.
The reports said 216 boys and no girls were born in the 132 villages between April and June. But officials found 180 girls and no boys were born during the same period in 129 different villages. And to complete the mixed picture, 88 girls and 78 boys were born in another 166 villages.
Overall 961 live births were recorded in Uttarkashi between April and June. A total of 479 were girls, while 468 were boys. (The rest were possibly stillborn) This, officials say, corresponds favourably with the district’s sunny sex ratio of 1,024 women for 1,000 men, higher than the national average of 933 women per 1,000 men.
Officials say the media possibly cherry-picked the birth data provided by volunteer health workers entrusted with collecting it. Some 600 of these workers are tasked with the job of recording pregnancies and births, and carrying out immunisation and birth control programmes.
“I feel media reports about the no-girl villages have been misinterpreted. Also, there is not enough understanding of the context. We’ve ordered an investigation anyway,” Ashish Chauhan, the senior-most official of the district told me.
So 26 officials have fanned out across 82 villages to check the veracity of the data and to find out whether something is wrong.