At 31, Bijli Devi weighs just 44 kg. Weak and pregnant, she has come to Katlupur sub-centre in Sonipat district for a routine vaccination. The doctor has flagged her pregnancy as high risk. This is her seventh in 12 years. She has six daughters, 2 to 12. “I have little choice,” she says. Her husband, an agricultural labourer, and in-laws want a son. She doesn’t know what will happen if the seventh is a girl too. Her two oldest daughters have dropped out of school. They now work as farm labourers alongside their father. “We never went for sex-determination,” Bijli Devi adds. “We don’t have the means.” A sex-determination test, illegal in India, costs ₹50,000-60,000 on the black market.
In May this year, a secret sex-determination racket, running in the middle of Gurugram, was busted. At Aayu Hospital in Hari Nagar, a mere 2 kilometres north of Sector 37 police station, along the frenetic arterial stretch of Khandsa Road off the Delhi-Jaipur Highway, sleuths dismantled a syndicate peddling prenatal gender testing. Arrested consultant radiologist Manjit Kumar would allegedly conduct the sex-determination test for ₹40,000.
Here, in the pulsating heart of the Millennium City, directly opposite the cacophonous Sector 10A market, thrived the illicit sex-determination centre. This, more than a decade after the clarion call of “Beti Bachao Beti Padhao” (BBBP) echoed from Panipat, more than a thousand surgical raids executed, and upwards of 4,000 miscreants incarcerated.
The bust wasn’t just about catching criminals. It exposed a deeper failure: the slow collapse of monitoring and the fading fear of law among offenders. For the enforcement teams, the brazenness of it all was a jolt.
The rupture surfaced against an ominous backdrop: Haryana’s Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB) has plummeted to 898 girls per 1,000 boys in the first four months of 2026. Only four of the 23 districts — Nuh, Rewari, Sonipat, and Panchkula — breached the 900 mark. At the bottom of the table, Charkhi Dadri recorded 768 girls per 1,000 boys. Since BBBP’s inception, annual SRB figures had ascended, cresting at 923 in both 2019 and 2025.
The May raid revealed an uncomfortable truth. Between the gap of slogans and supervision lies the old persistent practice of eliminating female foetuses.
Bijli Devi, 31, is pregnant with her seventh child, and has come for a vaccination at Katlupur health sub-centre in Haryana’s Sonipat. Her family hopes she will have a son.
| Photo Credit:
Sushil Kumar Verma
Lost focus and direction
In May, another sex-determination racket at Leelawati Hospital in NIT Faridabad was also busted. The accused, Om Prakash, was not a doctor. A senior secondary pass-out, he ran the centre and used a foetal doppler, a handheld ultrasound tool used to listen to a baby’s heartbeat, for sex-determination, fooling desperate parents seeking sons. The hospital sits a stone’s throw from the district’s Chief Medical Officer’s office.
Sex-determination centres running openly in metro cities, along with the SRB slide, signal that a programme which once raised hope of fixing the skewed ratio is losing steam, say those associated with the programme for the past several years, adding that it demands a renewed, sustained crackdown and constant monitoring to restore accountability.
A Food and Drug Administration official who has participated in over 30 raids, including inter-State operations, says the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign has lost “focus” and “direction.”
“The two key components of the programme — constant monitoring and the crackdown — are now missing,” says the officer, requesting anonymity. He partially links the decline to the change of guard in Haryana and the transfer of then Additional Principal Secretary out of the State. He is now the Additional Secretary in the Union Health Ministry. The programme was personally monitored by then Chief Minister Manohar Lal, who was replaced by the incumbent Nayab Singh Saini before the 2024 Lok Sabha poll.
“The number of raids and FIRs has gone down, and the focus has shifted from action against illegal sex-determination centres to the medical termination of the pregnancies, putting the cart before the horse,” he remarks. The previous machinery used raids, FIRs, daily accountability.
From a peak of 271 FIRs in 2016, the crackdown collapsed to just 85 cases in 2023 and 47 in 2024. Though 154 cases surfaced last year, the priority had inverted. For the first time, cases filed under the Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994, stood at 37. However, FIRs under the Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP) Act, 1971, were by up 117. In 2026, only 28 FIRs have been registered until May.
“The monthly video conferences held with district officers, including Deputy Commissioners, before 2021, have now become a thing of the past, making the officers complacent,” he says.
Meenakshi Devi, 37, a mother to two daughters, at Katlupur health sub-centre in Haryana.
| Photo Credit:
Sushil Kumar Verma
The racket adapts, moves, hides
From its launch in Panipat on January 22, 2015, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi until September 2021, the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao programme in Haryana had one constant — nodal officer Rakesh Gupta.
Every month, he ran video conferences with Deputy Commissioners, Chief Medical Officers, and Food and Drug Administration officials from all districts. Files moved, and so did teams on the ground. As raids intensified, the racket didn’t vanish; it migrated. Sex-determination centres cropped up across the border in Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Rajasthan, Delhi, and Uttarakhand. Haryana officials then began holding meetings with bureaucrats and political leadership in neighbouring States, pushing for joint action.
COVID-19 disrupted the rhythm. Despite health officials being diverted to pandemic duty, for three years after the pandemic, the SRB ranged between 914-917, before a dip in 2024.
Formal tip-offs and informal networks fed the raids. Because illegal sex-determination centres must market themselves to find clients, word leaks. Teams used decoys to catch doctors and touts red-handed. But conviction rates stayed low, admit officials, though they do not disclose how low.
The ‘market’ told its own story. A sex-determination test that cost ₹5,000 to ₹15,000 before the crackdown shot up to ₹1.5 lakh. Demand didn’t fall, but supply crashed under monitoring and raids.
Rejecting allegations of policy failure, health officials assert that Haryana’s Sex Ratio at Birth has rebounded to 923 in 2025, driven by a renewed “crackdown effect”. They concede that post-pandemic complacency from 2019–2024 weakened enforcement, with fewer raids, causing SRB to slip to 910. The 2025 recovery, they argue, reflects revived surveillance.
However, the monthly SRB hovered between 889 and 910 through the first half of 2025. The final three months posted abnormally high ratios, ranging from 930 to 997. The pattern has raised eyebrows among officials and activists alike, casting doubt on whether the “2025 Recovery” reflects genuine improvement or statistical manoeuvring. Critics within the Health Department allege that male births were deliberately under-registered towards December to artificially inflate the annual average.
Responding to The Hindu’s query on the late-2025 spike and early-2026 dip in Sex Ratio at Birth, the Haryana Health Department argued that SRB was calculated for the calendar year and monthly fluctuations were routine. “Historically, SRB declines in the summer months and shows an upward trend from September to December,” the department stated. It added that total birth registrations increased in 2025 compared to 2024. As per CRS data, 5,16,402 births were registered in 2024, while 2025 recorded 5,19,691 registrations. The department maintained that seasonal variation, not data manipulation, explains the monthly swings in SRB.
It also said that top-level monitoring is ongoing, with weekly video conferences, and review meetings. A State Task Force chaired by Additional Chief Secretary (Health) meets regularly, while District Task Forces led by Deputy Commissioners convene monthly. Their approach was one of “reverse tracking”, targeting those resorting to illegal abortions.
The department flagged some key challenges in tackling female foeticide: the misuse of handheld, mobile-sized ultrasound machines; repeat offenders undeterred by legal action; and legal sex detection in countries like Thailand and Singapore, where people go to get sex-determination tests.
Such slogans have been written on walls across Haryana as part of “Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao” campaign in Haryana.
| Photo Credit:
Sushil Kumar Verma
The son preference
“The Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao mission in Haryana took a back seat towards the end of 2021 and the Swachh Bharat Mission came to the fore,” says Manasi Mishra, who heads the Research and Knowledge Management Division at Delhi-based non-profit Centre for Social Research (CSR) that works in the gender space.
CSR had been implementing the Meri Shakti Meri Beti programme since 2007, targeting prenatal sex selection and girl empowerment. After the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao programme was launched, CSR became the nodal agency for five skewed-SRB districts in Haryana: Gurugram, Ambala, Kurukshetra, Jhajjar, and Mahendragarh. The NGO ran BBBP there until 2021.
Mishra adds that once the sex ratio at birth showed improvement, the government began to relax. “There was no official announcement, but the call of the day was, since this target has been achieved, we should be more focused on the Swachh Bharat Mission and to make the State Open Defecation Free,” Mishra says.
Government officials working on BBBP were largely moved to sanitation work, she says. “All of a sudden, this change happened in every district. In the five districts I had been working with, BBBP took a backseat.”
Her 25 community watch groups reported rampant sex-selection amid zero monitoring during the pandemic. “They keep sending me messages that during the pandemic, sex selection went on rapidly and there was no check.” She warns that northern states like Haryana and Punjab have deep-rooted son preference and without economic upliftment of girls and visible role models, gains will soon be reversed.
“There is no concentrated effort to sustain the achievements of Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao. It remains a slogan only.” Earlier success came from multi-stakeholder work: Panchayat engagement, medical audits with PC-PNDT authorities, and mobilising ASHA and anganwadi workers.
Sunita, president of the CITU-affiliated Haryana ASHA Workers’ Union, attributes the post-Covid slowdown in enforcement to “fatigue,” frequent top-level transfers, and a disconnect from ground realities. Officers at the helm, she says, lack field insight, and there’s little action against violators. ASHAs are tasked with tracking pregnant women whose first child is a daughter.
“These women often get sex-determination done outside Haryana, then use easily available MTP kits for abortion — even over the counter,” Sunita explains. “When we report cases, no action is taken against the women because proving an illegal abortion is difficult.”
The demoralisation runs deeper. “Many private clinics sealed for illegal sex selection reopen after some time. It de-motivates teams that worked hard to bust them,” she says.
At the Katlupur vaccination centre, Meenakshi, 37, has two daughters, both of who were delivered by caesarean sections. Doctors warned her against a third pregnancy. She says there was no pressure from her husband or in-laws. She wanted a son. “My husband is unwell. His elder brother died. I thought a male child should carry forward the family name.” Her aunt, she claims, knows people who run illegal sex selection centres. She says she has never tried it.
The son preference remains entrenched. “A family in Nahari village celebrated for 17 days when a boy was born,” says Sunita. In September last, the ASHA Workers’ Union ran a month-long inquiry across Haryana to understand why female foeticide persists. “We didn’t find a single family that opted for family planning after their first child was a girl. But many stopped after a boy. The mindset has not changed,” Sunita says. “Everyone still wants a son.”
ashok.kumar@thehindu.co.in
Edited by Sunalini Mathew
