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Female infanticide in India has a history spanning centuries. Poverty, the dowry system, births to unmarried women, deformed infants, famine, lack of support services and maternal illnesses such as postpartum depression are among the causes that have been proposed to explain the phenomenon of female infanticide in India.

Although infanticide has been criminalized in India, it remains an under-reported crime due to the lack of availability of reliable data. In 2010, India reported approximately 100 male and female infanticides totally, producing an official rate of less than one case of infanticide per million people.

The Indian practice of female infanticide and sex-selective abortion have been cited to explain, in part, a gender imbalance that has become increasingly distorted since the 1991 Census of India. However, there are also other factors contributing to this trend of gender imbalance.

Definition
Section 315 of the Indian Penal Code defines infanticide as the killing of an infant in the 0–1 age group. The Code uses this definition to differentiate between infanticide and numerous other crimes against children, such as foeticide and murder.

Some scholarly publications on infanticide use the legal definition. Others, such as the collaboration of Renu Dube, Reena Dube and Rashmi Bhatnagar, who describe themselves as "postcolonial feminists", adopt a broader scope for infanticide, applying it from foeticide through to femicide at an unspecified age. Barbara Miller, an anthropologist, has used the term to refer to all non-accidental deaths of children up to the age of around 15–16, which is culturally considered to be the age when childhood ends in rural India. She notes that the act of infanticide can be "outright", such as a physical beating, or "passive" through actions such as neglect and starvation. Neonaticide, the killing of a child within 24 hours of birth, is sometimes considered as a separate study.

Causation
British colonists in India first became aware of the practice of female infanticide in 1789, during the period of the British East India Company Rule. Jonathan Duncan, the then British Resident in Jaunpur district of what is now the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, noted the practice among members of a Rajput clan. In 1817, Officials noted that the practice was so entrenched in certain regions that there were entire taluks of the Jadeja Rajputs in Gujarat where no female child existed in the clan. In the mid-19th century, a magistrate stationed in North-West India, claimed that for several hundred years no daughter had ever been raised in the strongholds of the Rajahs of Mynpoorie and that only after the intervention of a District Collector in 1845 did the Rajput ruler there let a daughter live. The British identified other high-caste communities that were practitioners of female infanticide in northern, western and central areas of the country; these included the Ahirs, Bedis, Gurjars, Jats, Khatris, Lewa Kanbis, Mohyal Brahmins and Patidars.

Marvin Harris, an anthropologist who was one of the first proponents of cultural materialism, theorized that these killings of legitimate children occurred only among the Rajputs and other elite land-owning and warrior groups. The rationale was mainly economic, consisting of a two-fold argument. One was to prevent the division of wealth and land among a large number of heirs, and the other was to prevent the payment of dowry upon the marriage of a daughter. Sisters and daughters would marry men of similar standing, thereby leading to the cohesion of wealth and power, whereas concubines and their children would not do so and thus were not allowed to live. He further argues that the need for warriors in the villages of a pre-industrial society meant female children were devalued, and the combination of war casualties and infanticide acted as a necessary form of population control.

Sociobiologists have a different theory to Harris. Indeed, his theory and interest in the topic of infanticide is born of his general opposition to the Sociobiological Hypothesis of the Procreative Imperative. The premise of the sociobiological theory is evolution and natural selection. It suggests that the biological differences between men and women allow men to procreate a much larger number of children than women can bear. This in turn, allows the lineage of elite families to be lengthened by their support of male children. Harris believes this to be a fallacious explanation because the elites had sufficient wealth to be able to easily support both male and female children. Thus, while Harris and other anthropologists such as William Divale see female infanticide as a way to restrict population growth, sociobiologists such as Mildred Dickemann view the same practice as a means of expanding the population.

Another anthropologist, Kristen Hawkes, has criticized both of these theories. Opposing Harris, she says that the quickest way to get more male warriors would have been to have more females as child-bearers. Opposing the sociobiological theory, she says that having more females in a village would increase the potential for marriage alliances with other villages. Further, she points out that while well-off elites would want to maximize reproduction, poor people would look to minimize it, suggesting that theoretically, the poor should have practiced male infanticide, which they seemingly did not.

Reliability of Colonial Reports on Infanticide
There is no data for the sex ratio in India prior to the British colonial era. Reliant as the British were on local high-caste communities for the collection of taxes and the maintenance of law and order, the administrators were initially reluctant to peer too deeply into their private affairs, such as the practice of infanticide. Although this did change in the 1830s, the reluctance reappeared following the cathartic events of the Indian rebellion of 1857 in which the East India Company government was supplanted by the British Raj. In 1857, John Cave Browne, a chaplain serving in Bengal Presidency, put forth Major Goldney's speculation of the practice of female infanticide spurred by "Malthusian motives" among the Jats in the Punjab Province. In the Gujarat region, the first cited instances of discrepancies in the sex ratio date from 1847 among the Lewa Patidars and Kanbis. These historical records have been questioned by modern scholars. The British made their observations distantly and never engaged with their Indian subjects to understand their poverty, frustrations, lifestyle or culture in depth. Browne documented his speculations on female infanticide based on hearsay evidence. Bernard Cohn stated that British colonial residents in India would not accuse an individual or family of infanticide, let alone an entire clan or social group, as the crime was difficult to prove in a British court. Thus, Cohn described female infanticide as a "statistical crime'", during the colonial rule of India.

Apart from numerous reports and correspondence on female infanticide from colonial officials, the practice was also documented by Christian missionaries, who were significant ethnographic writers in India during the 19th century. They sent letters to Britain announcing their missionary accomplishments and characterizing the Indian culture as savage, ignorant and depraved. Scholars have questioned this distorted construction of Indian culture during the colonial era, stating that infanticide was as common in England during the 18th and 19th century, as in India. Daniel Grey states that some British Christian missionaries of the late 19th century wrongly believed that female infanticide was sanctioned by the Hindu and Islamic scriptures, against which Christianity had "centuries after centuries come into victorious conflict".

Regional Methods of Infanticide
Barbara Miller showed that the maximum number of female infanticides during the colonial period took place in the North-West region of India, where the practice was widespread with the exception of a few groups.

David Arnold, a member of the subaltern studies group, says that various methods of "outright" infanticide were used such as poisoning with opium, strangulation and suffocation. Poisonous substances like the root of the plumbago rosea and arsenic were used for abortion, with the latter also ironically being used as an aphrodisiac and cure for male impotence. The act of direct infanticide among Rajputs was usually performed by women, often the mother herself or a nurse. Typically, women administered poison as a method of killing. Arnold describes it as "often murder by proxy" because the man remains removed from the event, thus able to claim innocence.

The passing of the Female Infanticide Prevention Act, 1870 made the practice illegal in the British Indian regions of Punjab and the North-Western Provinces. The Governor-General of India had the authority to expand the Act to other regions at his discretion.

Impact of Famines on Infanticide
Major famines occurred in India every five to eight years in the 19th- and early 20th-centuries, resulting in millions starving to death. Similar to what happened in China, these famines begat infanticide as desperate starving parents would either kill a suffering infant, sell a child to buy food for the rest of the family, or beg people to take the children away for no payment and feed them. Gupta and Shuzhou stated that massive famines and poverty-related historical events influenced historical sex ratios and have had deep cultural ramifications for girls due to altered regional attitudes towards female infant mortality.

Impact of Economic Policies on Infanticide
According to Mara Hvistendahl, documents left behind by the colonial administration following independence showed a direct correlation between the taxation policies of the British East India Company and the rise in female infanticide.

Regional and Religious Demographics
Demographic data shows that the Indian population had an aggregate excess of males from 1881 to 1941. The sex ratio was particularly skewed in Northern and Western regions of India, with between 110.2 and 113.7 males to every 100 females in the north, and 105.8 to 109.8 males to every 100 females in the west, across age groups. Visaria states that the female deficit was highest among Muslims, followed by Sikhs. The sex ratios of the different regions of India were correlated to the proportion of the Muslim population of the region. The only exception is the eastern region of India, where the overall sex ratio was relatively low despite a large percentage of the population being Muslim. If regions like Baluchistan, Sind and the North-West frontier which are now part of modern Pakistan, were excluded in the consideration of sex ratios, Visaria states that the regional and aggregate sex ratios for the rest of India over the 1881–1941 time period improve in favor of females, with a lower gap between the male and female population.

The South Indian region showed an exception to the female deficit problem, reporting excess females overall. This is partly attributed to selective emigration of males and the regional practice of matriarchy. .

Contemporary Data and Statistics
Infanticide in India, and elsewhere in the world, is a difficult issue to research because objective, reliable data is unavailable. Scrimshaw states that not only is the frequency of female infanticide underreported, but also the data on the differential care between male and female infants is elusive. The frequency of female infanticide and sex-selective abortion is indirectly estimated from the birth sex ratio, which represents a more equal number of males and females than the sex ratio at later stages in life. The natural ratio is assumed to be between 103 and 107 males for every 100 females. Any number above or below this range is considered as indicative of female or male foeticide respectively.

Over the last 20 years, China, Pakistan, Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and some Southeast European countries have reported lower gender imbalances than in India.There is an ongoing debate regarding the skewed sex ratios in the 0–1 and 0–6 age groups in India, partly attributed to female infanticide. The suggested reasons for high birth sex ratio include regional female foeticide using amniocentesis, underreporting female births, smaller family sizes and the selective stopping of family size once a male is born, all of which occur regardless of income or poverty because of the patriarchal culture. Sheetal Ranjan reports that the total male and female infanticide reported cases in India were 139 in 1995, 86 in 2005 and 111 in 2010; the National Crime Records Bureau summary for 2010 gives a figure of 100. This depicts the underrepresentation of the true statistics related to female infanticide.

Reports of regional cases of female infanticide have appeared in the media, such as those in Usilampatti in southern Tamil Nadu.

One of the biggest reasons for the increase in female infanticide is the increase in the number of private Ultrasound Scanning Centers, which often tell the sex of baby. As these centers become more accessible and affordable, people that find out that their child is female, abort the baby.

Religious demographics
The 2011 Census has given the following sex ratios by religious communities

Reasons for Female Infanticide in India
One reason for female infanticide in India is extreme poverty, leading to an inability to afford raising a child. Ian Darnton-Hill et al. state that the effect of malnutrition, particularly micronutrient and vitamin deficiency, adversely impacts female infant mortality. Extreme poverty has also been proposed as a reason for high infanticide rates in other cultures throughout history, such as including England and France.

Another common reason for female infanticide is the existence of the dowry system in India. Although Indian Governments have taken steps to abolish the dowry system, the practice persists, especially in rural regions, greatly burdening poor families. This incentivizes poor families to practice gender selective abortion, which is perceived by them as a better option than being socially ostracized due to their inability to provide a suitable dowry for their daughters.

Relationship difficulties, low income, lack of support and mental illnesses such as postpartum depression have also been reported as reasons for female infanticide in India. Some reasons given for both male and female infanticide include unwanted children such as those conceived after rape, deformed children born to impoverished families, and children born to unmarried mothers lacking appropriate birth control.

In 1999, Elaine Rose reported that disproportionately high female mortality is correlated to poverty, the lack of infrastructure and few means to feed one's family. This is also seen by the fact that the increase in the ratio of the probability that a girl survives to the probability that a boy survives happened concurrently with favorable rainfall each year and the consequent ability to irrigate farms in rural India.

State Response
In 1991 the Girl Child Protection Scheme was launched. This scheme operates over the long-term, giving with rural families having to meet certain obligations such as sterilisation of the mother. Once the obligations are met, the state puts aside ₹2000 in a state-run fund. The fund, which should grow to ₹10,000, is released to the daughter when she is 20: she can use it either to marry or to pursue higher education.

In 1992, the Government of India started the "baby cradle scheme", piloted in Tamil Nadu. This allows families to anonymously give their child up for adoption without having to go through formal procedures. The scheme was received with mixed reviews. On the one hand, it was praised for possibly saving the lives of thousands of baby girls. On the other hand, it was criticized by human rights groups, who said that the scheme encouraged child abandonment and also reinforced the low status in which women were held. The scheme involved cradles being placed outside state-operated health facilities. The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu further incentivized people to abandon the practice of female infanticide by giving money to families that had more than one daughter. 136 baby girls were given for adoption during the first four years of the scheme. However, in 2000, 1,218 cases of female infanticide were reported, which led to the scheme being deemed a failure and it was thus abandoned. Yet, it was reinstated in the following year.

The census 2011 data showed a significant decline in the clid sex ratio(CSR). Alarmed by the decline, the Government of India introduced     "Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao" (BBBP) program. The overall motive of the program is to prevent gender discrimination, ensure survival and protection of the girl child and to ensure the education of the girl child.

International Reactions
The Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF) wrote in their 2005 report, Women in an Insecure World, that at a time when the number of casualties in war had fallen, a "secret genocide" was being carried out against women. According to DCAF the demographic shortfall of women who have died for gender related issues is in the same range as the 191 million estimated dead from all conflicts in the 20th century. In 2012, the documentary It's a Girl: The Three Deadliest Words in the World was released. This focused on female infanticide in China and India.

In 1991 Elisabeth Bumiller wrote, "May You be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India", around the subject of infanticide. In the chapter on female infanticide titled, "No More Little Girls", she identifies the prevailing reason for the practice as "not as the act of monsters in a barbarian society but as the last resort of impoverished, uneducated women driven to do what they thought was best for themselves and their families."

"Gift of A Girl Female Infanticide" is a 1998 documentary that explores the prevalence of female infanticide in southern India, as well as steps that have been taken to help eradicate the practice. The documentary won an award from the Association for Asian Studies.