The position of a girl-child is not very happy in country like India.
The battle for life commences right from the day a girl child is conceived in her mother’s womb. Her existence, her survival, is as unpredictable as the game of Pitch and Toss.
It seems to be a bigger tragedy when desire and the failure to deliver a male child forced a Sethaanibai deserted the life of her 15th child delivered on June 11 at a local government hospital merely because she is a girl.
A Lambani couple at Sindhol Thanda in Bidar taluk gives birth to 15 girl children, for the last fifteen years. Of these 15, six children died as soon as they born.
Sethaanibai’s husband Govardhan Rathod works as a daily wage labourer in Mumbai. With no land of their own in the Thanda, Sethaanibai works as a coolie for a living.
“I have given birth to so many children in the hope of getting a male child. I’m so ashamed to give birth again to a female, I did not even look at its face and left it in the hospital”, she says.
She has already tied the knot of her three elder daughters. Sethaanibai regrets that because of poverty she has not been able to take care of her children and give them education.
“With great difficulty I got my three daughters married off. I left my last child in the hospital as I do not have the resources to raise her. So far I have not got any benefit from the government, I appeal to them to come to my rescue”, Sethaanibai pleads.
The department of women and child welfare came to know about her plight, promised to lend Rs 1 lakh and have also decided to get her seven-year-old daughter into a hostel.