National

How the battle against female infanticide was waged

— Photo: M. Karunakaran

Sheela Rani Chunkath, Chairperson, TIIC, with M.S. Swaminathan, chairman, MSSRF, at a function in Chennai on Wednesday.

CHENNAI: Until not too long ago, eliminating newborn girls by feeding them with poison sap, squeezing snuff powder into the nose or asphyxiating the child with a wet blanket was alarmingly commonplace in a few pockets in Tamil Nadu.

“There was a general awareness of the practice of female infanticide… but there was no data quantifying the magnitude of social evil,” said Sheela Rani Chunkath, who, during a stint as Health Secretary, spearheaded a successful mass awareness campaign against the issue in the mid-1990s.

Replying to a felicitation hosted on Wednesday by the M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) and The Hindu Media Resource Centre, on being honoured with the Prime Minister’s Award for Excellence in Public Administration (2006-07), Ms. Chunkath recalled that female infanticide was initially thought to be a social malady confined to Piramalai Kallars in Madurai district.

It took a pioneering vital events survey of infant mortality rates to piece together the disturbing picture on the geographical distribution of female infanticide. The gender differential in the IMR was sharply skewed against the girl child to the ratio of 69: 130 in Dharmapuri, followed by 69:100 in Madurai and 67:95 in Salem. “The strategy had to strike at the very root of the patriarchal value scale…the priority was to destroy the social legitimacy about female infanticide,” said Ms. Chunkath who is now chairperson of the Tamil Nadu Industrial Investment Corporation.

Female infanticide turned out to be a post-Independence phenomenon and one that cut across social and economic strata. Mothers would resist the morbid idea of eliminating the girl child but would eventually succumb to the spousal argument that the family could ill afford to rear and marry off a girl with dowry. In 1998, Dharmapuri became the crucible of a Health Department strategy to mobilise the community against female infanticide.

A travelling theatre group consisting of local artists fanned out to the district, staging shows at 3,000 locations. Villagers hosted lunch or supper, and panchayat leaders galvanised into supporting the campaign, Ms. Chunkath said. The movement, which gained wide acceptance in Dharmapuri, was later taken to the other problem districts.

Ms. Chunkath said that if Dharmapuri, once ranked as one of the most backward districts, had now become an internationally famous case-study on grassroots mobilisation, it was because of the great teamwork, from village health nurses to committed officials. The Health Department then turned its attention to changing the perception of maternal death from private tragedy and intervention of fate to a failure of the social system.

Another pioneering system of verbal autopsy and maternal death protocols found many deaths occurred as a result of poor maternity infrastructure, forcing pregnant mothers to seek far-away hospitals for deliveries. The Department’s response was to set up a Comprehensive Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (CEmONC) centre at the community level.

If the birth companion programme allowed the presence of a female member of the family inside the labour room, teaching rural women to cycle was an innovative step towards empowerment and designing the PHC architecture to facilitate overnight stay of nurses laid the foundation for Tamil Nadu becoming the first State where its network of 1,421 PHCs work round the clock, Ms. Chunkath pointed out.

M. S. Swaminathan, MSSRF chairman, said Ms. Chunkath exemplified one facet of the public service: along with the perks and privileges, it provided an opportunity to give back to society.

T. V. Antony, former civil servant, Venkatesh Athreya, who was associated with Ms. Chunkath’s social campaigns, and Meena Swaminathan felicitated.

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