NEW DELHI, 30 March 2006 — An Indian doctor and his assistant have been jailed for two years for carrying out a test to determine the sex of an unborn baby, the first such conviction in a country where thousands of female fetuses are aborted each year.
A court in the town of Palwal, 135 km south of the capital New Delhi, in the state of Haryana, sentenced Dr. Anil Sabhani and his technician, Kartar Singh, on Monday after finding them guilty of conducting a sex determination test in 2001.
The two men were also fined 5,000 rupees each.
They were found to have contravened the country’s pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which has been in force since 1994 but under which no earlier jail terms had been handed down.
The only previous prosecution under the act led to a fine for improper keeping of records.
Social activists and health officials in Haryana and across India have been alarmed by the emergence of a heavily skewed sex ratio in several parts of India as couples use new technology to achieve a traditional preference for sons. Even in relatively affluent parts of major cities like New Delhi and Harayana’s capital Chandigarh, census figures have shown the sex ratio falling as low as 800 girls to every 1,000 boys.
A joint study carried out by researchers in India and Canada recently suggested that half-a-million unborn girls may be aborted in India every year.
With advertisements and campaigns having failed to check female feticide, the government decided to try its hand at another strategy and sent decoy patients to doctors. As per their plan, government officials in Haryana sent three pregnant women to medical professionals to find out whether their clinics conducted abortions based on unborn baby’s gender.
Dr. Sabhani was filmed as he met a decoy patient, identified the sex of the fetus and said, “It would be taken care of,” local newspapers reported.
“The entire episode involving the decoy patient had been videographed making the conviction possible,” said Dr. R.C. Aggarwal, a health official in Haryana who is part of a body which enforces the sex-test law.
In making its judgment, the court said: “It is due to the illegal acts of persons like the convicts, that the sex ratio is declining day by day.” The court called the declining sex ratio “horrific.”
