Awareness reaches your doorstep

I had written this one long time back and forgot to post it. Just when I was going through my blog folder I stumbled upon this one.

As we are progressing towards a better future as a nation, there are a lot of issues pulling us down, majority of them concerning women in India. We are a nation of more than a billion but the sorry state of our sex ratio spells it all out. Increasing female infanticide, domestic violence, rise in crime against women show that the progress will be rendered meaningless because of this large disparity amongst the two genders.

Warning signs
Off late issues concerning women are making the headlines. May it be the recent ringthebell.com campaign or television serials like Balika Vadhu, awareness about women’s issues has reached the bedrooms of every household. Launched by human rights organisation Breakthrough India, the Bell Bajao (Ring the Bell) campaign urges people to ring the door bell when they hear about domestic violence in a house. Their impressive ad campaigns with Boman Irani as the ambassador may not have garnered enough eyeballs but have definitely penetrated into a few layers of the society. The world statistics of domestic violence translates into 960,000 reported incidences of violence, against current or former partners every year. Three million women are abused every year by their husbands or boy friends.

Domestic violence doesn’t just occur in lower middle class or poor households but can happen to anyone. Just few days back singer and composer; Adnan Sami’s wife filed a complaint against him for domestic violence. Such news makes us think as to where be we leading as a society. Despite the Indian government enforcing The Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act in 2005, crimes against women are reported everyday. Indian women have always been subjected to such atrocities, may it be at workplace, at home or even on the roads. Right from her birth to her death, a woman goes through million experiences that may have harmful effects on her. It is quite worrying that nothing much on policy level is being achieved to curb it.

Losing the Ys
Colors channel of the TV18 network has a new offering, ‘Is desh na aana ladoo’ focuses on female infanticide. The gory visuals used as promos are stark enough to get attention for the cause. The sex ratio is falling at an alarming rate, as more and more people are going in for sex determinations. In rural areas where a lot of people do not have access to sex determination facilities, female infanticide is shockingly common. The parents wait until the mother gives birth, and when they find out that a daughter is born, they go ahead and kill the baby by adopting various means such as strangling the baby, giving her poison, dumping her in a garbage bin, drowning her, burying her alive, starving her, stuffing her mouth with salt, or leaving her outdoors overnight so she dies of exposure. This practice is rampant in parts of Rajasthan, where the baby is put into a huge bowl of milk and killed.


Media watch
Balika Vadhu comments on most social issues against women like dowry, child marriage, infanticide and is highly popular amongst all classes. In India there is a crime against women in every three minutes, one rape every twenty nine minutes and one recorded case of dowry death in every seventy seven minutes. Cases of cruelty meted out by husbands and in laws are seen in every nine minutes. Idea cellular service’s new advertisement has a girl giving it back to eve teasers in truly commando style. For that matter even the viewership of K serials in diminishing as more and more women are hooked onto serials with social messages. As we wake to the problems facing women in India, one does really wonder many more lives do we have to sacrifice till we learn to respect women.