Medical milieu

THE DIRECTIVE ISSUED by the Supreme Court last week to the States and Union Territories on the implementation of the Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Regulation and Prevention of Misuse) Act of 1994 is yet again suggestive of the long road from legislation to executive action. While the rules relating to the enforcement of the Act were formulated in 1996, the Central Supervisory Board and corresponding bodies at the State level have hardly been functional. If the Supreme Court, while hearing the Public Interest Litigation, was constrained to call for an action taken report within six weeks after noting the lack of progress by a majority of States in identifying the authority that is to enforce the provisions of the Act as well as the number of unregistered laboratories in the country, it is because its previous order of last May went unheeded by all the States except Tamil Nadu and Kerala.

The medical profession has for sometime now been witnessing a proliferation of diagnostic laboratories accompanied by indiscriminate prescription of highly sophisticated scans with little regard to the actual need among patients for such techniques, with an underlying motive for hefty financial returns among physicians as well as laboratories. It was perhaps only a matter of time before prenatal diagnosis began to assume the kind of proportions it has in recent years. These are if anything symptomatic of the formidable ground realities underpinning a modernising society where the traditional framework is at once steadfastly resilient and readily absorptive. Thus, patriarchal prejudice resuscitates itself in the face of the onslaught from developmentalism by a selective recourse to technological know- how. A striking parallel perhaps is the renewal of caste identities after the expansion of industrialisation, urbanisation and other modern institutional arrangements, or the persistence of untouchability, despite its legal abolition more than half a century ago. Thus the whole gamut of issues relating to foeticide pose a challenge at various levels and the scope for judicial intervention is bound to be limited. Beyond legal remedies, any real progress would ultimately hinge on a range of attenuating circumstances such as women's education and employment, economic independence and decision making power. It is noteworthy, especially in the context of the comparison made, on the one hand, between the overall economic advances made by Punjab and Haryana and the contrasting adverse sex ratio among children in these States, on the other, that not all of these variables necessarily presuppose or follow one another. On the contrary, regions that are relatively less advanced economically but have made significant strides in each of the above indicators may well account for fewer instances of foeticide.

Against this general scenario, reading a direct correlation between sex determination of foetuses and the adverse sex ratio among children seen in the provisional results for the 2001 population census may be unwarranted. For besides the prevalence of foeticide, demographers have alluded to better reporting of age among boys and girls in the 0-6 category and higher female mortality among factors that contribute to an adverse sex ratio.

Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Section  : Opinion
Previous : Exports and the external economy
Next     : Relating to the new paradigm