A Fight to Save Baby Girls in India

USILAMPATTI, INDIA â€" Back in the 1980s, this rural patch of the southern state of Tamil Nadu had the dubious distinction of the worst reputation for “gendercide,” or murder of unwanted baby girls, in India.

There were no official statistics, of course. Just as no one keeps a tally of how middle-class Indians today use scans to determine a baby’s sex and whether to abort a female fetus, the child deaths in the Usilampatti region, home to about 85,000 people, were whispered about, not totaled.

Often, births were unregistered, conducted by a village midwife who would then also kill unwanted girls. This was done quite openly â€" and prompted Valli Annamalai, head of the Mother and Child Welfare Project, an initiative of the Tamil Nadu state branch of the nongovernmental Indian Council for Child Welfare, to act.

She started by trying to grasp the size of the problem. Council statistics suggest that, in 1990, there were as many as 200 unaccounted-for infant deaths, all of girls, in this region.

“Girls were considered a burden and a liability in these parts,” she recalled during a recent visit to a council center in the village of Pannaipatti. Raising economic prospects “was the only way to stop the mindless violence and discrimination.”

One way to improve women’s lot, she said, was to care for infants and thus allow mothers to return to their work â€" mostly toil in the fields of this spottily fertile region, where women have been second-class for centuries.

The Pannaipatti center â€" a bare room with dog-eared posters of fruits, letters and numbers hanging from the ceiling, â€" is one of three run in the area since 1988. At one point, there were 14 centers with more than 350 children, but when the government started to provide more child care, Ms. Annamalai diverted attention to other projects.

At Pannaipatti, as the midday sun beat down on a recent day, 22 children 1 to 3 years old were in the care of a teacher and a trained assistant, who work 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. six days a week, playing, singing, telling stories and ensuring that children eat a lunch of sprouted green gram, lentils and rice. Mothers, most of whom work in the fields from dawn, arrive about 3 p.m. to collect the children and chat.

Ms. Annamalai, now 62, recalled the long slog to win trust. “It took a year to break the ice,” she said. Getting direct access to young mothers through child care centers helped the council to understand their problems, she said.

A first daughter was usually allowed to live, said P. Pramil Kumar, 48, a council worker in Usilampatti. But subsequent girls were under threat, so “we would register every pregnant woman and monitor their second and third pregnancies, as these were deemed high-risk.”

In 1991, while counseling parents to keep their daughters, the council opened a center where babies could be dropped off in a special cradle. A total of 146 babies â€" all girls â€" arrived from 1991 to 1999.

Medical staff members had to be on hand, for babies often arrived with infections from crudely cut umbilical cords and needed monitoring or even hospitalization in the nearby city of Madurai.

In 1994, after failing to save one baby girl, the council started to recruit volunteers from Usilampatti’s 309 hamlets. “We realized that we couldn’t be everywhere,” said R. Ramraj, the council’s rural development officer in Usilampatti. “We had to create not just awareness, but allies too amidst the villagers.”

After just a month, a group in the village of Lingappanayaganur, tipped off council staff members in good time. “Not only did we prevent the murder,” Ms. Ramraj said, “we also got the family to sign the adoption papers.”

Rathinam, then a 22-year-old field laborer in the hamlet of Kaluthu, recalls the first baby girl she saved, early one Sunday 17 years ago. Rathinam, who like many women here uses only one name, arrived as a village family prepared to feed its newborn girl poisonous milk of oleander. With two other volunteers, Rathinam persuaded the midwife who had delivered the baby to hand her over.

“We took the baby, 10 minutes after birth, still caked in blood and with the umbilical cord wrapped around her, and fled,” Rathinam recalled.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 8, 2013, in The International Herald Tribune.