New Delhi - The Indian government announced Monday a slew of incentives for poor families with girl children in an effort to stem the practice of female foeticide. Under the scheme named Dhan Laxmi after the Hindu goddess of wealth, poor families with a girl child would be given cash incentives for registration of birth, immunization, enrolment in school and delaying marriage till she is 18, India's Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury said.
In addition the girl child would be provided an insurance cover of 100,000 rupees at birth and the rest of the incentives would come to a cash package of about 200,000 rupees, Chowdhury was quoted as saying in an official release.
The scheme would initially be introduced in seven states as a pilot project and later extended to the entire country.
These include northern Haryana and Punjab, southern Andhra Pradesh, central Chattisgarh and Uttar Pradesh and eastern Orissa, Jharkhand and Bihar, where gender selection and selective abortion have led to an imbalance in the male to female ratio.
The child sex ratio in Haryana, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Delhi and Chandigarh is at less than 900 girls per 1,000 boys, the release said.
Modern sex selection technology combined with a traditional preference for boys are the main reasons for the skewered ration.
Traditionally girls are seen as burdens, as huge dowries have to be paid for their weddings and even if they do earn income it adds only to the capacities of the family into which they marry.
Hinduism, the majority religion in India, also allows only a son or male relative to light the father's pyre. Then there is the notion of the family lineage which can only be propagated through the male line.
Chowdhury said the aim of the Dhan Laxmi scheme was to make people value the girl child. "People worship the goddess of wealth in temples, but not the girl child at home," she said.
