In the Boy Zone

Open goes looking for Malerna. A recent AIIMS study discovered the village has only 370 females to 1,000 males

Being in Malerna is a bit like being in a Tarantino movie—you have no clue of the storyline. None of the excuses seem to make any sense, it’s so gory it sickens you, but you just can’t stop watching because you don’t know what happens next. The sex ratio in Malerna is skewed horribly. This village in Haryana has 370 girls to 1,000 boys at birth—less than half the national average of 927.

Even as the state government is sure to appoint at least a commission to look into the matter, for the men of the village, it’s really no big deal. They seem unperturbed, mildly irritated at most, about their village’s newfound infamy.

We run into Duli Chand Koli, Malerna’s former sarpanch. He seems likely to be the person who could tell us what’s going wrong in the village—he is the father of three daughters and two sons. “We haven’t heard of any female infanticide in the village,” he says, “But there is a weakness for boys… but it’s there in everyone’s heart, tell me who doesn’t want a boy child?”

Thus does Haryana’s famed chauvinism begin to rear its head. By the sound of things, Koli’s three daughters were born in the pursuit of baby boys, and he hasn’t had more babies since his wife gave birth to boy-and-girl twins and then another boy, who is four now.

Speak to him about it and Koli shrugs. “There is just one thing that makes a man age—worry. First, you worry about educating the girl, then you worry about getting her married. If you have to take a loan for it, the rest of your life will be spent repaying it. Ask me, I have three girls,” he says, offering the wisdom of his experience.

Koli echoes a sentiment that most others in the village harbour. What is worrying is that you don’t have to dig or prod for it to emerge, it’s right here on the surface. And what makes this attitude even more shocking is the fact that this village isn’t in the back-of-beyond. It’s just 30 km away from Delhi, which has more NGOs fighting for the girl child per sq km than any other place in India, perhaps even the world.

Jagdev Hooda, the sarpanch of the nearby village of Dayalpur, also insists that people don’t want to have a girl child because it has become even more financially unviable now that educating daughters has become a must-do. “People don’t want a girl because now the expense is double of what it was earlier,” Hooda says.

Worse still, Malerna’s sarpanch Duli Chand Yadav seems to think that this education is bound to have a cascading effect on the amount of money needed for her marriage. “The more she has studied, the more pressure there will be on us to try and find a boy who is better educated. Which adds to the cost,” Yadav says.

In fact, this is the reason why many are not interested in their girls going in for higher studies. That said, Malerna offers a paradox. It has about eight girls who are pursuing engineering, with several villagers admitting that girls tend to perform much better in studies than boys. A visit to the local school both muddies as well as clears the waters. Of the 163 students enrolled in the primary section of the government school, 77 are girls while 83 are boys. The ratio is almost equal in middle school.

How come? According to Padam Kumar Dalal, who is in charge of the school’s primary section, villagers might be sending the boys to private schools in Ballabhgarh or Faridabad—“That could be the only possible explanation.”

Plus, of course, there is the age-old argument about the return on investment that boys can deliver. “On the other hand, they put all their money together for the boy, he’s the one they cheat for and scrounge,” Hooda laughs.

Even those who say there is no harm in a girl child in a household with two boys, believe this is so that they “can help their mothers out in the kitchen”. The most common argument is that “a poor daily-wage labourer” will not have enough money to spend on a daughter. Even the state government’s Ladli Yojna has failed to rescue the missing daughter. This is what happens when procreation is an issue of affordability.

Yet, strangely enough, money is not a big concern for many in Malerna if the looks of the village are anything to go by. You arrive in Malerna imagining a backward village with straw huts, haphazard constructions and overflowing gutters. What you find instead are newly-constructed multi-storeyed bungalows with sloping roofs, as villagers revel in the new money that highway land acquisitions has bought them. The full car garages testify to the good life.

What is even more surprising is what Yadav tells us between drags of an imposing hukkah. According to him, it’s the nouveau riche in the village who are more against the girl child than the poor. Jawahar, who we meet at Yadav’s house, feels that the rich are only getting greedier. “They think if they have a girl, they will have to give away the money in dowry. They want to amass all their money and hope to add some more to the pile when they get a son married,” he says.

And dowry is only getting more and more elaborate as people in the village suddenly come into wealth. Dowries in the village now compete on luxury cars. There is no feeling of stigma, no shame —it’s as commonplace as paneer at a wedding dinner. Nobody notices. It’s there.

The villagers en masse place the blame for the declining ratio of women on the government’s family planning programme. The villagers we speak to freely admit that while there are hardly any in the village who had a girl child “out of choice”, they insist that the natural ratio of male and female births had been maintained till the two-child programme came into play. “When people had 4-5 kids toh ladkiyon key bhi bhaag khul jaate thhe,” Koli says, puffing a beedi. Yadav and Hooda agree. “In the villages, earlier people would produce a line-up of 10 girls and keep on producing till the time they had a boy. Thankfully, things are changing now,” Hooda says, with a slight air of satisfaction.

Unfortunately, though, things aren’t really changing for the better. Rather, it’s quite the opposite. Instead of having two or three children, most couples who have had two boys get ‘The Operation’ (vasectomy) done, thus ruling out the girl altogether.

Money and urbanisation have only made things worse. Yadav and his brother Karan Singh Yadav say that the pre-natal sex-determination ban hasn’t done much. Villagers have access to ultrasound machines to tell the gender of the foetus, and have the wherewithal to get abortions done. “These days, women can go and even get them on their own,” one villager half jibes.

In fact, recently, one of the two centres whose licenses have been cancelled in Haryana for carrying out sex-determination tests is in Faridabad. But there are several more to carry on the work. “You give a doctor Rs 500 more and he’ll tell you what the child is… after all, he also has to make money,” Hooda says. Most abortions happen around the third or the fourth month—quietly.

Hooda recounts a story of someone who has undergone about ten abortions because the couple had five daughters and wanted a son. Meanwhile, a friend of his speculates that it’s the virility of the strong ‘seed’ that makes a boy and wonders if it’s something in the diet of these villages that produces boys instead of girls.

The one question that’s sure to pop up then is whether the declining ratio means there will be no girls to marry the village boys. Is that a worry? Not quite. These villagers don’t marry into the same village anyway, or even the same gotra, so it’s quite common for brides to come from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh.

The odd part is that Malerna has no dearth of villagers who sing odes to daughters. But still, the never ending quest for the male child continues. Like we said, it’s a bit like a Tarantino film.

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