Discrimination against the girl child in rural Haryana, India

Sutapa Maiti, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

This paper highlights the discrimination as active and passive elimination of girl child in different socio-economic conditions as a life course approach by exploring the data form 329 married women conducted in five villages of Haryana, India in 2003. Active elimination of girl child has been seen in terms of abortion according to sex of the surviving children, pregnancy order, mother’s childhood experience, autonomy status and marital instability. Finding suggests that autonomy, education and exposure to mass media have negative impact whereas co-residence with in-laws and no male child has significant positive impact for active elimination. In-laws play an important role in abortion under the umbrella of son preference. In logistic regression result children ever born by sex and autonomy was found to be significant. Passive elimination in terms of extreme gender differential was significant in morbidity condition, treatment-seeking behaviour, and immunization pattern of the dead child.