Govt to monitor pregnancies and abortions

The move is aimed at putting an end to exploitation of girl child and correcting India’s heavily skewed sex ratio, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Updated on: Jul 13, 2007, 04:49:26 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The central government plans to make it mandatory for the country’s women to register their pregnancies with it. It also wants abortions to be carried out only under specified circumstances.

The ministries behind the move think it will help them stop exploitation of the girl child and correct India’s heavily skewed sex ratio.

But there are concerns that this data may be misused. The move might allow babus and law-enforcers to enter — and control — the most personal domains of citizens, and provide state protection to corruption and the possible exploitation of women.

“It can lead to too much intrusion in somebody’s private life,” Ranjana Kumari, president of Women PowerConnect, a group of women’s NGOs, said. “It will also be very difficult to obtain such data. In China, the government found it tough to implement the one-child norm. Whether such a thing will be possible in a democracy, I doubt,” she added.

On Thursday, Women and Child Development Minister Renuka Chowdhury told Hindustan Times that she wanted each pregnancy to be registered. “This will help to check both foeticide and infant mortality,” she said.

Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss had said on Wednesday, “We will provide facilities to conduct pregnancy tests in each village. It will help provide better healthcare facilities to mother and child.”

If Chowdhury has her way, abortions will be allowed only where there is a “valid and acceptable reason”. HT could not get officials to reveal the criteria that would make an abortion “acceptable and valid”.

Chowdhury said that the reason for monitoring abortions was to bust organised foeticide rackets that have been repeatedly reported from Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh. “With this, mysterious abortions will become difficult,” she said, pointing to India’s sex ratio of 927 girls for every 1,000 boys.

An official said the data would help zero in on pockets that show huge gaps between the numbers of pregnancies and births. “The reason for such a major difference can then be investigated,” the official said.

It will be the job of health centres, hospitals and maternity homes across the country — both government and private — to register a pregnancy when the woman visits for the first time. “This confidential information will then be passed on to local health officials who will maintain a data bank,” the official said.

Anganwadi workers from Chowdhury’s ministry will be authorized to register pregnancies in the villages. “It will help the workers track the health of both mother and child,” an official said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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