By IANS
Bhubaneswar : With the shocking discovery of seven female foetuses – some eight months old and all stashed away in polythene packets – in an Orissa district, furious social activists Friday demanded a high level probe into the incident.
A 12-year-old schoolboy found the aborted foetuses at the foothills in Duburi, some 100 km from here in Nayagarh district, July 14.
Upendra Kalasha, who studies in Class 6 in a nearby school, spotted some bloodstained, sealed polythene packets and showed them to his friends.
"A passerby rushed to the spot and was shocked after opening them," child rights activist Anuradha Mohanty told IANS.
Mohanty is among a dozen social activists and media men who visited the spot on behalf of the Orissa Alliance on Child Rights – a forum of child rights networks and groups in the state – after the incident was reported in the local media this week.
"The foetuses appeared to be six to eight months old and all were female. Three of them even had hair on the head, a resident of the nearby Gambhari village told us," Mohanty said.
Villagers also revealed that they had seen similar female foetuses at the same spot a number of times in the past.
"Police have registered a case but have not arrested anyone so far," said Ranjan Mohanty, national convenor of the Campaign Against Child Labour.
"Since it appears to be the outcome of a nexus between health officials, nursing homes and administrative officials, we are demanding a crime branch probe into the incident," he said.
The district of Nayagarh has a population of 861,516 of which 446,177 are male and 418,339 are female, Anuradha Mohanty said. The female population is declining because of rising infanticide, she added.
The district has more than 12 private nursing homes and ultrasound clinics. Most of them are not even registered, said another child rights activist Sneha Mishra.
"They conduct ultrasound tests to determine the sex of a foetus, after which doctors perform an abortion illegally if it is found to be female," she said.
India banned the practice of prenatal selection and selective abortion more than a decade ago but it has not had much impact.
"It remains a common practice in Orissa, claiming about half a million female lives each year," said Mishra. "We have brought the matter to the attention of police and administrative officials but they are silent," she alleged.