A Daughter Who Isn't Wanted: The Persistence of Female Infanticide in India

Somewhere in a district hospital in Haryana, a nurse quietly wraps a newborn girl in a thin cotton cloth. The mother hasn't asked to hold her. The father hasn't come inside. By morning, the child may be gone — not from illness, not from poverty alone, but from a decision made long before she drew her first breath. This is not a story from another century. It is happening now.

Female infanticide in India — the deliberate killing of newborn girls — is one of the oldest and most stubborn expressions of gender discrimination in the country. Despite decades of legislation, campaigns, and policy intervention, India's sex ratio at birth remains deeply skewed. According to NFHS-5 (2019–21), the sex ratio at birth nationally stands at 929 girls per 1,000 boys. In states like Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Haryana, the numbers are grimmer still. These are not abstract figures. Each missing girl is a life that was extinguished or never permitted to begin.

The Deep Roots of Female Infanticide in India

To understand why female infanticide persists, you have to understand what a daughter represents in many rural Indian households — not a child to be celebrated, but a liability to be managed.

The dowry system remains the most direct economic driver. Despite being illegal under the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961, dowry demands are routine across large swaths of northern and central India. For a family already stretched thin by agricultural debt, the birth of a daughter triggers an immediate calculation: how much will this cost us in fifteen years?

That calculation has real stakes. Families take loans, sell land, and fall into cycles of debt to marry off daughters. When a second or third girl is born, desperation can overwhelm instinct. The killing is rarely loud. It happens through suffocation, starvation, or deliberate exposure — methods that leave little evidence and attract little scrutiny in remote villages.

When Poverty Meets Patriarchy

Poverty alone does not explain female infanticide. Some of India's wealthiest states — Punjab, Haryana, Delhi — have among the worst child sex ratios. According to Census 2011, Haryana recorded a child sex ratio of just 834 girls per 1,000 boys, among the lowest in the nation.

What poverty does is amplify existing patriarchal values. When resources are scarce, boys are prioritized for nutrition, healthcare, and education. Girls become invisible in the family ledger. The social barriers that already prevent girls from accessing education in India begin not in the classroom but in the delivery room — or before it.

Sex-Selective Abortion and the Technology of Disappearance

Female infanticide has evolved. The crude, physical act of killing a newborn has, in many regions, been replaced by something quieter and harder to trace: sex-selective abortion following illegal prenatal sex determination.

The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (PCPNDT) Act of 1994 was designed to ban the use of ultrasound for sex determination. In practice, enforcement has been patchy and corruption pervasive. Informal networks of radiologists, touts, and complicit families continue to operate across rural and semi-urban India. A family in a small town in western UP can find someone to perform an illegal scan for as little as ₹500.

The consequence is visible in the numbers. India is estimated to have 45.8 million "missing women" — women who would be alive if not for sex-selective practices — according to research published in medical journals and cited by UNICEF India. That number should stop anyone cold.

The Role of Heir Culture

Much of this is driven by what demographers call "son preference" — the deep cultural belief that only a son can carry forward the family name, perform funeral rites, and inherit property. In Hindu tradition, the last rites (*antyesti*) are ideally performed by a son. This ritual belief has demographic consequences.

The desire for "at least one son" drives repeated pregnancies and, when technology permits, sex selection. Families who would otherwise stop at two children continue having children until a boy arrives — and female fetuses are terminated along the way.

A Scene from the Field

In a village on the outskirts of Alwar district in Rajasthan, a woman named Sunita sits outside her kuccha home in the late afternoon. She has four daughters and no sons. Her in-laws stopped speaking to her after the third girl was born. Her husband works as a daily wage labourer in Jaipur and comes home once a month.

When asked about her youngest daughter — a bright-eyed three-year-old named Guddi, who is trying to chase a goat across the courtyard — Sunita's expression shifts between pride and anxiety. "Log poochte hain, 'phir ladka nahi hua?'" she says. People keep asking why there's still no son.

She does not say what she was pressured to do when she was pregnant with Guddi. She doesn't need to. The silence around certain subjects in rural India is itself a kind of testimony.

Sunita's story is not unusual. It is replicated in hundreds of thousands of homes across Rajasthan, Bihar, Haryana, and UP. The pressure on women to produce sons — and the violence, abandonment, or worse that follows when they don't — is the lived architecture of female infanticide. Understanding the rights of girl children in rural India means confronting the conditions that strip those rights before birth.

Government Response: Laws That Exist, Implementation That Lags

India's legal framework against female infanticide and sex-selective abortion is, on paper, robust. The PCPNDT Act, the Dowry Prohibition Act, the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, and the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (BBBP) scheme launched in 2015 — all represent genuine legislative and policy intent.

Beti Bachao Beti Padhao, in particular, was launched specifically in 100 districts with the worst child sex ratios. Official data shows some improvement in sex ratio at birth in targeted districts since the scheme's launch. The Union government has expanded it to cover all districts nationally.

The Gap Between Policy and Practice

But aggregate improvements mask persistent regional failures. NFHS-5 data shows that in several districts of Rajasthan and UP, child sex ratios have not improved meaningfully in a decade. Village-level health workers — ASHAs and ANMs — are often the only government presence in remote areas, and they are frequently underpaid, undertrained, and overwhelmed.

More critically, the cultural work remains undone. A scheme can fund awareness campaigns and billboards. It cannot, by itself, change a family's calculation about what a daughter is worth.

The challenges and opportunities in rural India's education system are deeply connected to this question of worth. When girls survive and go to school, when they learn to read and earn and think independently, the economic logic of son preference begins to fracture. Education is not a soft intervention. It is a structural one.

The Connection Between Female Infanticide and Girls' Education

Here is a fact that development researchers have documented consistently: the states and districts where girl children are most likely to be killed or aborted are also the states where girls' school enrollment and retention are lowest.

This is not coincidence. It reflects a unified worldview in which female lives are valued less. When a girl does survive in such an environment, she enters a world that has already decided she matters less. She will be pulled out of school to do household work. She will be married before she turns eighteen. She will, in many cases, face the same pressure to produce sons that her own mother faced.

According to ASER 2023, while enrollment of girls in rural primary schools has improved significantly, dropout rates at the upper primary and secondary level remain a serious concern, particularly in states like UP, Rajasthan, and Bihar. The enrollment of girls in Indian schools is improving — but enrollment is only the first step. Survival, both physical and social, must come before it.

The importance of girl child education in India cannot be separated from this context. Educating a girl who has been allowed to live, while a silent epidemic continues to take others before they can speak — that is the contradiction development workers and NGOs must hold in their minds at all times.

What Shifts the Numbers: Evidence from the Ground

There is evidence, slow and uneven but real, of what works.

Community-level behaviour change — sustained, peer-led conversations about the value of daughters — has shown results in programs run across Rajasthan and Maharashtra. When women themselves organize and challenge the norms that devalue their daughters, change is more durable than when it comes from government messaging alone.

Conditional cash transfer schemes like Rajasthan's Mukhyamantri Rajshri Yojana and the national Sukanya Samridhi Yojana (SSY) attempt to change the economic equation. They make investing in a daughter's future financially rational. They are imperfect instruments, but they move in the right direction.

Male engagement is underused and undervalued. When men — fathers, brothers, village elders — become advocates for daughters, the social cost of girl child discrimination rises. Projects that work directly with men and boys on gender attitudes have shown promising results in Bihar and Jharkhand.

Education of girls themselves is the longest arc of all — but it is also the most powerful. Educated women are significantly more likely to ensure their own daughters survive, go to school, and marry later. The gap between rural and urban classroom experiences in India must be closed not just for equity, but because it is the most reliable upstream intervention against son preference and female infanticide.

The Moral Weight of Missing Girls

India's missing girls are not a statistic. They are an accumulation of choices — made in fear, in poverty, in the grip of patriarchal expectation, in the absence of alternatives. Some of those choices were made by women who had no power to choose otherwise. Some were made by men who never questioned what they had been taught to believe.

That is what makes female infanticide so resistant to simple solutions. It is not one thing. It is a web of dowry, property rights, ritual belief, economic precarity, and gender norms that has been woven over centuries. Pulling on any single thread is not enough.

At MMF, we believe that every girl born in India deserves not just survival but a full life — safe, educated, and free from the shadow of being considered less. Our work at Mahadev Maitri Foundation is grounded in the conviction that changing the fate of girl children requires working at every level simultaneously: with families, with communities, with schools, and with the girls themselves.

The daughters who are wanted — truly wanted, not merely tolerated — grow up differently. They speak up in classrooms. They delay marriage. They make decisions about their own bodies. They raise sons who value women.

That is the world we are building toward. One girl, one family, one village at a time.

*If you believe every daughter deserves to be wanted, to be educated, and to live a full life — join us in making that possible. Or support our work with a donation and help us reach the families who need us most.*