New Delhi: The Supreme Court yesterday expressed its concern over the deteriorating sex ratio and chided state governments over their failure to check sex determination clinics and punish law violators fuelling female foeticide.
“People have a belief that if they don’t have a male child they will go to narak (hell)”, the court said, asking “where is this narak”?
The Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention) Act, 1994, bans determination of the sex of a foetus in the womb. The apex court bench of Justice K S Radhakrishnan and Justice Dipak Misra while perusing reports filed by Punjab, Haryana, Delhi, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Maharashtra said that “there is a lackadaisical attitude (in the enforcement agencies). How to wake them up?”
The court said that it would hold quarterly monitoring of the steps taken by state governments to stop determination of sex. “Why there is no awareness that girl child is equally loveable as boy,” the court said, inquiring from the counsel. Justice Misra said that at the awareness camps the people should be told that “female child is better than male child as girls have neurons which makes them wise”.
Aghast at the submission by Bihar that they were not even aware of female foeticide and sex-determination test, Justice Radhakrishnan said: “It is an alarming situation” that they were unaware of the existence of female foeticide. IANS
