Now, 'gurus' on gender mission

Updated on: Aug 4, 2006, 10:42:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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When the system fails — the gurus step in. Renuka Chowdhary, minister-in-charge of women and child development, will meet eight “seers” — to whom she has shot missives — over the next month to “persuade” them to create mass awareness against female infanticide, gender imbalance and polyandry.

A recent United Nation Population Fund (UNFPA) study on the poor sex ratio in districts like Fatehgarh and Gurudaspur in Punjab and Kurukshetra and Ambala in Haryana, where men outnumber women, tells a grim story.

“Crime against women has gone up by 15-20 per cent. Women from the tribal areas of Jharkhand and Bihar are forced into marriage and prostitution in rural Punjab and Haryana,” a ministry official said quoting from the report.

These states are also witnessing a new trend — instances of polyandry (tradition of brothers marrying one woman). Polyandry — practiced during the Vedic ages — finds mention in religious scriptures. People of the Kinnar district of Himachal Pradesh have been known to practise it. But gender bias has given it a wider reach in modern India.

Districts like Fatehgarh and Kurukshetra in Haryana — with the lowest sex ratio of 754 women for 1,000 men and 770 women for every 1000 men respectively — are gradually finding the concept “family brides” more “convenient and economical”.

“The few cases reported are from among the poorest, who can’t buy a bride,” an official said.

Officials fear that the trend can spread to other low sex ratio districts resulting in “societal changes”. There are about 150 districts in the country with sex ratio lower than the national average of 927 — which fell from 976 in 1961. The government is unable to cope with the trend — and has fallen back on spiritualists to set the balance right.

Women and child development ministry officials said, “They have been chosen as they have mass following.” According to Choudhary, their intervention will have tremendous “impact” on the popular psyche as some of them have cult status.

The ministry of women and child development, in a letter to top spiritual gurus of the country, said polyandry and crime against women were common in areas with skewed male-female ratio.

“Societal imbalances are creeping in and reports of trafficking of women, forced marriages and polyandry have come to our notice,” a ministry official said. So, Guru Ramdev and Sri Sri Ravishankar may soon have a new message for the masses.

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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