Police found 12 foetuses dumped near a garbage bin in Ahmedabad, Gujarat on Monday, a police officer said.
Residents in Ahmadabad alerted police about the foetuses lying close to the bin, officer Mansingh Dabhi said.
It was unclear where the foetuses came from. Dabhi said they may have been dumped by hospitals in the area.
The foetuses were sent to a government-run hospital for post-mortem and to determine their sex, he said.
The practice of aborting female foetuses is widespread in India with a preference for male children. While abortion is legal in India, sex-determination tests were outlawed in 1991.
The Lancet, the British medical journal, has estimated as many as 10 million female foetuses may have been aborted in the country over the last two decades.