Indian police have arrested a man on suspicion of burying his newborn daughter alive because he wanted a boy, officials said on Wednesday.
Local villagers rescued the baby over the weekend after spotting her feet sticking up from a shallow sand pit in farmland in the Jajpur district of the eastern state of Odisha.
Many Indian parents consider daughters to be a burden because of the huge dowries still frequently required for marriage, while sons are expected to support them in their old age.
Chandra, a 35-year-old part-time taxi driver, is suspected of taking the baby from her mother soon after she was born on Saturday.
‘They were unable to explain about the missing child after we scanned the locality for expecting mothers,’ investigating officer Jyoti Prakash Pande told AFP.
He said Chandra under questioning had admitted burying the baby, saying he was too poor to raise a daughter.
The couple already have two daughters and a son and had aborted two earlier pregnancies, the officer said.
It is unclear what will happen to the newborn, named Dharitri – a Sanskrit word meaning ‘the earth’ – by staff at the hospital where she is under observation.
The girl will be handed over to the state-run child welfare committee after she is discharged from the Dharmasala hospital.
A mobile video shot at the time of her rescue on Saturday shows a villager slowly removing sand with his bare hands and gently pulling the infant, wrapped in a blue piece of cloth, out of the ground.
The baby suddenly cries as a large, jubilant crowd tries to arrange an ambulance.
The area where she was discovered is one of many impoverished states where families hope for sons and go to any lengths possible to avoid having to raise a daughter.
Chief medical officer Jajpur district Fanindra Kumar Panigrahi told AFP after she was discovered: ‘She is doing fine and all her parameters are normal. She is a full term baby, weighing around 2.5 kg.
‘Her umbilical cord was intact and body was still covered with vernix.’
A witness who helped with the rescue, Alok Rout, said: ‘It was a little kid who first saw the feet of the child buried under a compost dump in a field.
‘Later we rushed to the spot and rescued the newborn girl.’
The incident highlights the scandal of female foeticide still plaguing the world’s second most populous nation, which has a skewed sex ratio of 940 females for every 1,000 males, according to the last official census in 2011.
Earlier this month police recovered 19 female foetuses from a sewer in the western state of Maharashtra and accused a doctor of illegally aborting them on behalf of parents desperate for a boy.
On Monday a female fetus was found buried near a sewer in New Delhi after dogs were spotted digging the earth around it.
India banned prenatal sex determination to stop its misuse, although the tests are still thought to be common, particularly in poor rural areas.
A 2011 study in the British medical journal The Lancet found that up to 12million girls had been aborted in the last three decades in India.
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