WUNRN
Women's Feature Service
By Alka Pande
Nirmala with her adopted daughter, Ankita. Nirmala is one of the courageous women in Uttar Pradesh, who fought with her own relatives to save the life of a baby girl.
Nirmala narrated the
story, “It sounded like a baby was crying, but I looked around and there was no
one around. Then I discovered that the sound was emanating from the storeroom
of the health centre.” The room was not in use, its window panes were broken
and there was a lot of rubbish strewn around.
Continued Nirmala, “I
opened the door and what I saw made me shriek. A newborn baby was lying on the
pieces of broken glass wrapped in a torn vest. The baby must have been crying
for a long while – its face had a bluish tinge, and its mouth was parched.”
Even as she recalled this, tears roll down her cheeks. This incident changed
her life.
The first thing
Nirmala did was to pick the baby up and breastfeed her. She was able to do this
because she had only recently stopped feeding her six month old daughter. She then tried to find out whose daughter this
was, lying so helplessly amidst the debris of an abandoned room. She went to
the nearby hospital to try and locate the real parents, but no one could give
her any information.
Eventually, Nirmala
brought the baby home and had her treated at a private nursing home in the city
since there was no facility for proper childcare at Savansa. That was when she
came against a huge challenge. She already had three sons and a daughter. Her
husband and his family could not tolerate the thought of having another girl
child in the family. This led to a serious disagreement between Nirmala and her
husband, and before long she found herself thrown out of her matrimonial home
along with the children.
Nirmala, and her
brood of five, found shelter in her parents’ house. Endowed with a sense of self
respect, she decided to work as a labourer to support the now much extended
family. Finances ran low. She and her brothers together earned less than Rs
6,000 every month – hardly enough to support a family of 15. Yet, fortunately
for Nirmala, her parental family had no problems with welcoming its new member.
The child, now named Ankita, is today a much loved member of the household.
Nirmala was one of
several courageous women of the state to have fought with her own relatives to
save the life of a baby girl. The social action group, ActionAid, which has
been working on the issue of India’s skewed sex ratio through its campaign,
‘Himmat Hai Jine Ki’ (Courage to Live), honoured her – along with 14 other
women and two men, who have, despite their desperately poor personal
circumstances, adopted girl children abandoned by their biological parents.
The honours list
included Sunita Yadav from Hisaba
Another woman
honoured by ActionAid was Shivkumari, from Kuthound block of Jalaun district.
She comes from a fisher community and has personally influenced 13 women from
seeking sex selective abortions under family pressure.
These illiterate,
marginalised women and men have shown their ability to understand the basic
principle of gender equality in a predominantly patriarchal society like that
of northern Indian, where son preference is the norm. According to the latest
Census figure, UP’s child sex ratio stands at 899 girls for 1000 boys, which is
much lower than the national average of
914/1000, a figure that is itself disturbing.
According to
Debabrata Patra, Regional Manager, ActionAid Lucknow, what was alarming was
that this decline was no longer confined to the districts closer to
Vatsalya, a
Lucknow-based organisation, which has been relentlessly working on curbing sex
selective abortions, analysed the data from the 2001 and 2011 Census to
estimate the number of missing girl children. Said Dr Neelam Singh, Chief
Functionary, Vatsalya, “Going by the statistics, over 700,000 girls are missing
between 2005 and 2011. This means that at the national level, more than 100,000
girls go missing every year, which means more than 10,000 every month and over
300 every day!” She reiterated the need to implement urgently the PCPNDT Act in
letter and spirit, even as efforts to change mindsets carry on apace.
But clearly there was
something to be learnt from the actions and responses of the 15 women who went
against the grain and demonstrated to their community, and the world, the value
of the life of the girl child. Joanna Kerr, International CEO, ActionAid, who
was present when Nirmala and three others were being honoured, put it this way,
“I praise, respect and salute these women who have saved so many lives.”
She went on to
narrate her own story, “In 1966, my mother was pregnant with her third child.
She already had two daughters and was keen to have a son. I was already named
Andrew. Since there was no technology at that time to determine the sex of the
child, I was allowed to live. If my mother had not allowed me to be born I
wouldn’t have been able to meet so many courageous women today. In the same
way, there are so many prime ministers, engineers, doctors, scientists, who are
not with us today only because they were not allowed to be born.”