AMRITSAR:
The Shiromani Gurdwara Parbhandak
Committee (SGPC) has announced that it will henceforth step in to
adopt the abandoned baby girls and will ask all gurdwaras to keep
cradles at the entrances to receive any unwanted daughters. Punjab
is facing the menace of female infanticide and foeticide and the
state's sex ratio has dipped to alarming levels. "We will bear the
expenses for bringing up these children. Don't kill them," SGPC
chief Avtar Singh Makkar told a gathering at the Takth Damdama Sahib
late Friday evening.
He said the decision had to be taken because of
the spurt in cases of abandonment of girls, many of them just born,
in public parks, railway compartments, and even garbage heaps. That
men in the state can't find Punjabi women to marry, and are scouting
for partners in different cultures and distant places — Tripura,
Assam, Jharkhand, Kerala, Orissa and Bengal — has not really
deterred Punjabis fromdoing away with girls as the sex ratio dips to
a shocking 793 females to 1,000 males.
In Fatehgarh Sahib district, it is an abysmal
754:1000. The SGPC has not said what will it do with a child if it
turns out that someone has placed an unwanted male child in the
cradle outside the gurdwara. Neither has it made clear how and who
will be responsible for the immediate care and upbringing of the
girl child and whether it is in tie up with any other organisation
for the task. All of this is typical of the SGPC which is in the
habit of announcing good intentions without any debate or state of
preparedness to take on the challenge.
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