India’s 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls under the age of seven – activists fear eight million female foetuses may have been aborted in the past decade. The BBC’s Geeta Pandey in Delhi explores what has led to this crisis.

Kulwant has three daughters aged 24, 23 and 20 and a son who is 16.

In the years between the birth of her third daughter and her son, Kulwant became pregnant three times.

Each time, she says, she was forced to abort the foetus by her family after ultrasound tests confirmed that they were girls.

“My mother-in-law taunted me for giving birth to girls. She said her son would divorce me if I didn’t bear a son.”

Kulwant still has vivid memories of the first abortion. “The baby was nearly five months old. She was beautiful. I miss her, and the others we killed,” she says, breaking down, wiping away her tears.

Until her son was born, Kulwant’s daily life consisted of beatings and abuse from her husband, mother-in-law and brother-in-law. Once, she says, they even attempted to set her on fire.

“They were angry. They didn’t want girls in the family. They wanted boys so they could get fat dowries,” she says.

India outlawed dowries in 1961, but the practice remains rampant and the value of dowries is constantly growing, affecting rich and poor alike.

Kulwant’s husband died three years after the birth of their son. “It was the curse of the daughters we killed. That’s why he died so young,” she says.

Common attitude

Her neighbour Rekha is mother of a chubby three-year-old girl.

Last September, when she became pregnant again, her mother-in-law forced her to undergo an abortion after an ultrasound showed that she was pregnant with twin girls.

“I said there’s no difference between girls and boys. But here they think differently. There’s no happiness when a girl is born. They say the son will carry forward our lineage, but the daughter will get married and go off to another family.”

Kulwant and Rekha live in Sagarpur, a lower middle-class area in south-west Delhi.

Here, narrow minds live in homes separated by narrow lanes.

The women’s story is common and repeated in millions of homes across India, and it has been getting worse.

In 1961, for every 1,000 boys under the age of seven, there were 976 girls. Today, the figure has dropped to a dismal 914 girls.

Although the number of women overall is improving (due to factors such as life expectancy), India’s ratio of young girls to boys is one of the worst in the world after China.

Many factors come into play to explain this: infanticide, abuse and neglect of girl children.

But campaigners say the decline is largely due to the increased availability of antenatal sex screening, and they talk of a genocide.