Bride Trade - Shortage of Females - Female Infanticide - Trafficking

Onu has two husbands. On paper, she's only married to Ram Phal, an ageing widower. But, his younger brother, Kripal Singh, 45, also shares her - as his 'sexual bride'.

Sitting on her haunches, this 20-year-old cooks silently in a musty and smoky corner of her new home in this tiny hamlet in the interior of Haryana.

The complex web of poverty and misery forced her parents in Assam to sell her for a tempting sum of Rs20,000 ($445) a year ago.

"Staying here," she says wryly, "is perhaps better than being a burden on my parents."

Both brothers, who are poor vegetable farmers, cannot afford to buy two brides. So they decided to share one.

After years of searching for a bride in their own state, both brothers say they were compelled to hire a tout who led them outside Haryana - to Assam, a state in northeastern India - to broker a 'deal' with Onu's poor family.

Strangely, Haryana is facing an acute shortage of brides, forcing many like Ram Phal and Kripal Singh to buy brides from other states. And that's because in villages across Haryana, girls are slowly, yet inexorably vanishing.
 
In this Indian state there are only 819 girls against 1,000 boys aged up to six years. The situation in some districts is far worse than the state average - there are only 771 females per 1,000 males.

In 1991, that figure was 879 per 1,000. Over the years, female birth rates here have plummeted, leading to an acute girl deficit. Analysts attribute this skewed sex ratio and dwindling number of girls to the easy access to technologies that scan the sex of a foetus - in a society where the girl child is largely unwanted.

According to British medical journal, Lancet, more than 10 million female foetuses - 1 in every 25 - have been aborted in India in the last decade.

As girls in the region become a rarity, men in the region are increasingly turning to touts and middlemen to buy brides from other states.

Girls from Indian states like West Bengal, Assam and Jharkhand and even from neighbouring countries like Nepal and Bangladesh are much in demand here for their fair skins and shy demeanour.

Commodities
Colloquially called 'Paros' - or 'women from outside' - these brides can easily be bought, just like commodities, for anywhere between $50 and $900; the younger the girl, the higher her price.

The US State Department annual human trafficking report this year placed India on a watch list for lack of government response to the trafficking of women and Indian police involvement in trafficking rackets.

In 2002, the UN reported that 700,000 women and children were being trafficked in Asia each year - over 100,000 women in India alone.

According to its research by Shakti Vahini, a local NGO working to root out this rampant trafficking, and the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM), about 45,000 Paros have been sold in and around Haryana this year alone. Human rights activists fume at this blatant commodification of women.

"Initially sold as wives, many are then resold into sex work or as slaves," says Raj Singh Chaudhury, an activist from Shakti Vahini.

"Rings of traffickers make huge sums of money from selling girls here but they always get away," he adds, referring to the tepid response of the administration that hasn't been able to prosecute the pernicious middlemen.
These marriages are seldom registered, he observes, despite a recent Supreme Court verdict making registration of marriages mandatory - making prosecution even more cumbersome.

Fourteen-year-old Tripala from Jharkhand met a ghoulish end in Dahola in April this year. Last year her poverty-stricken mother in Ranchi sold her to Ajmer Singh of Dahola village for $300. The latter then claimed that he was 'buying' her as a bride for his brother.

After having been kept captive in shanties in Delhi, she was brought to Dahola and kept locked for days in Singh's farmhouse. And when she refused to sleep with his brother who couldn't find a wife, she was savagely beheaded with a machete.

Despite the possibility of exploitation, shockingly, some women choose to come here willingly, risking their lives, because it's a way for many to escape debilitating and unsparing poverty back home.

Hiding her face in a veil, 21-year-old Seema from West Bengal says her parents sold her to farmer, Mahavir Singh from Haryana, a man almost twice her age, as it was the only way to stave off hunger.

What eclipses the tragedy of being sold by her own family, she says, is the promise of a salubrious life here. Life in Bengal was wretched. When she came here six months ago her frame was cadaverous, her neck reed-thin.

She'd barely get a bowl of rice a day to eat back home. Here, with curd, milk abundantly available, she's got her health back.

"I'm happy here," she responds shyly when we ask her if she's treated well here. As we speak, a bevy of men in dirty loincloths - from her family and the village square - crowd around us. A few answer questions on her behalf, others fawn at her.

This unabashed bride trade wouldn't happen if girls in Haryana weren't a rarity, analysts say.

To remedy the problem, the administration is cracking down on illegal ultrasound clinics. Only in March this year a doctor and his assistant in Haryana were sentenced to two years in jail for revealing the sex of a female foetus to parents who only wanted a male child, and then agreeing to abort it.

Recently, two doctors in the neighbouring state of Punjab have been accused of burying at least 50 female foetuses after carrying out illegal abortions.

Implementation
Although a few offenders have been sent to jail under the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act that makes sex determination tests illegal, activists say, a sterner implementation of this law is necessary.

What's worrisome is the easy availability of a new US-patented gender testing kit - the Baby Gender Mentor test kit.

It enables sex-determination as early as five weeks after conception, and can be easily purchased on the internet for a paltry sum of $275. Officials from the Indian Medical Association testily admit the availability of this kit could bring about mass abortions of female foetuses - far beyond government control.

Experts believe it's a misconception that only the rural poor and illiterate are aborting girls - it's a practice well rooted among the educated and affluent as well. And such products are becoming very popular among them.

The Haryana government, on its part, is trying to bring a change in parochial mindsets that deem the girl unwanted. It's now offering perks to stop aborting girls.

Declaring 2006 as Girl Child Year, the state's Chief Minister, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, mooted an innovative scheme called "Ladli" - or "the adored one" - under which an incentive of Rs5,000 ($100) per year would be given for five years on the birth of a second daughter in a family.

If a family has a daughter or only daughters, the parents would be entitled to get old age allowance of Rs300 ($7) per month after 55 years of age.

Financial perks are indeed alluring incentives, locals say, as they will help them collect a dowry for their daughters - something they must obligatorily offer to the groom when marrying off a girl. Very often, it surpasses their means - largely why girls here are labelled a burden.

The problem though is ignorance. Several villagers interviewed in and around Dahola still haven't heard about these ambitious government initiatives.

Considering the enormous scale of this problem, activists say, it'll take years to affect social change - and eventually bring an end to trafficking.

Nari Niketan, a women's shelter in Karnal, a large neighbouring town, helps women rescued from the clutches of traffickers to liaise with their families.

Lal Bano, a diminutive, young girl from Assam - who says she's 15, but is not very sure - was rescued by cops just before she was about to be sold into prostitution in Haryana.

The traffickers managed to escape before the police raid. Officials contacted her family - but no one has come to fetch her yet. It's been six months.

"I want to go home to my family," she says, sounding buoyant. "I want to start my life again."

Raj Singh Chaudhury, however, who has rescued girls like Lal Bano from traffickers, doesn't want to give in to these illusions. "Even if they go back, very often, they end up back in Haryana," he says. "Their parents sell them - and resell them."

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