On a recent trip to Rohtak, in Haryana, I met Savitri – probably in her mid-thirties; dressed in a chiffon salwaar-suit, with her head coyly covered with the dupatta – she tiptoed into the room to serve us tea. Her hands smeared with intricate mehendi designs and her wrists adorned with red glass-bangles; a large red-bindi gracing her forhead and an innately south-Indian style pendant hung on her slender neck. A little baffled seeing such a pendant around a very rustic north-indian woman’s neck – I asked her if it was a gift from someone she knew down south. A little hesitant at first, she softly replied, “pitajhi ne diya hain.” Now, being a Bengali myself, I can assure you that my Hindi isn’t too great either, but surely not as bad as to pronounce ‘pitaaji’ as ‘pitajhi’! Yes, it was her pronunciation which gave away, in those few seconds, that Savitri, wasn’t after-all from Haryana or any place nearby – she was from Kerala.
I later spoke to Savitri, at length and asked her how she landed up here, from a very matriarchal Kerala background to one that is utterly male-dominated and blindly conservative. What Savitri narrated was astounding – she said it wasn’t just her, but that there were many such Malyalee women, married into farming households of Haryana. I later to spoke to a journalist friend who revealed how due to Haryana’s abominable sex ratio and growing female foeticide, most farming households now ‘traded’ women from other states to grace their households…. and yet female infanticide is the order of the day here - an irony of gargantuan proportions and a sordid fact of our ‘Incredible Indian’!

Some quick facts –
The states of Punjab, Haryana and Jharkhand have the worst sex ratios in the country. According to the 2001 census, there are only 874 women with respect to 1000 men in these states. The national average was 933.

Figures by United Nations say that about 7,50,000 female foetuses are aborted every year in India.