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AHMEDABAD, INDIA, October 4, 2004: Woe betide bachelors in north Gujarat who don’t have sisters – they will have to “buy” a bride and this has created an annual US$1,000,000 industry in the region. Three communities of caste Hindus in Mehsana, 74 km north of here, follow a tradition of Satta-Paddhati in which the brother and sister of one family are married to the sister and brother of another family. Now there is the low sex ratio of 779 girls to 1,000 boys. Households with a son but no daughter are thus forced to cast their net wide and pay exorbitant sums for brides, according to a survey conducted by Ahmedabad-based NGO Chetna – Centre for Health Education, Training and Nutrition Awareness. “Because of the lowest sex ratios in Mehsana, boys who don’t have sisters are not getting wives. There are thousands of eligible bachelors who are forced to remain unmarried because they don’t have a sister to exchange,” said social worker Rajshri Swaminarayan. “This situation often results in parents buying wives for their boys,” Swaminarayan said. Explained Illa Vakharia of Chetna: “Buying wives has brought many evils along with it. Agents or pimps mint money on purchase of wives, and parents of wives ask for more money or else call their girls back home. “In Mehsana alone, annually US$1,000,000 is spent on purchasing wives who come from as far as south Gujarat and even out of the state,” Vakharia said.



Ironically, development and literacy in Mehsana have contributed to the bias against the female child. “Mehsana, with a literacy rate of 75.54 percent and a relatively high per capita income and development level, continues to be plagued by the evils of female selective abortion,” said Vakharia. Although the Pre-Natal Detection Techniques (PNDT) Act prohibits the use of sonography machines to determine the sex of the unborn child, doctors and radiologists in Mehsana flout the law with impunity. “The evil of female selective abortion is not confined to Mehsana alone but has spread as far as across the tribal belt of north Gujarat, where sonography machines are no longer a rarity. They have multiplied many fold in the past 10 years. “Sonography, which were non-existent in places like Banaskantha, Sabarkantha, the Panchmahals and Dahod a few years back have proliferated there,” Vakharia said.

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