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Desperate Bachelors; India's skewed sex ratio is forcing men to scour faraway places and even orphanages for brides 

Date: Sunday, December 16, 2007

YOUNG men not far from Delhi are paying a price for their society's traditional preference for boys. There are few girls for them to marry.

The rampant disposal of female foetuses in neighbouring Haryana state has badly skewed the sex ratio. There are 861 girls for every 1,000 boys, compared to the normal ratio of 1,000 females for every 1,030 to 1,050 males.

The shortage of girls of marriageable age has prompted desperate men from the state to scour far-off places and orphanages in search of prospective wives.

Sociologists and local social activists say that trafficking in women has become a big business in some villages where nearly 60 per cent of the men remain single because they cannot find women to marry.

In some cases, poor women are bought from far-away states such as West Bengal, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand and across the border from Nepal and Bangladesh. The rate for a 'bride' ranges from 3,000 rupees ($110S) to 30,000 rupees.

Others have turned to orphanages for a bride.

'The parents of boys come and plead with us for a girl, but we don't have many girls in the orphanage. They are desperate to get their sons married,' said Mr Mohan Madhav Godbole, head of Bal Ashram, an orphanage run by an independent trust in the Sonepat district of Haryana.

Mr Godbole, 59, told The Sunday Times that an average of 100-200 parents approach the orphanage every year, seeking brides for their sons. Many prospective grooms also come looking for partners at the orphanage.

'Men from all walks of life come to us,' he said. 'They come from conservative families, but are not bothered about the caste or creed of the girls. They are just eager to get married.'

Because getting girls from nearby villages has become almost impossible, some men are travelling all the way to Kerala, a southern Indian state 3,000km away, in search of brides.

Kerala, the most literate state in the country, is said to have the best sex ratio in the country - 1,036 females for every 1,000 males.

A United Nations Fund for Population Activities (UNFPA) report in 1997 pointed out that if Kerala's sex ratio was taken as a yardstick, across India there would be close to 32 million to 48 million 'missing women' - the victims of female foeticide.

The report declared Haryana as being in a 'state of emergency' with regard to its sex ratio.

News reports say that despite linguistic and cultural differences, about 150 men from Haryana have married girls from Kerala in recent years. This has happened even though it takes a long time for the Malayalam-language-speaking bride and the Hindi-speaking groom to begin to speak to each other.

Ms Sudha, 31, of Kannur, a town in north Kerala, who has married a farmer in Haryana, was quoted in The Indian Express newspaper as saying: 'I'm old and no one would marry me back home. One has to pay too much money to marry there. Here I have a house and a husband, and it is not too difficult to get used to the different ways of this state.'

To prevent the practice of child marriages, particularly in rural areas, the Indian government has fixed 18 as the minimum marrying age for females and 21 for males. But a growing number of women are putting off marriage till they are 25 or more to pursue higher education and careers.

Ms Sudha, who passed the higher secondary school examination, married Mr Bijender, a school dropout, about a year and half ago and now lives with her husband's family in Hansi town, about 175km west of Delhi.

Like most men in rural Haryana, Mr Bijender uses a single name.

The couple have a three-month-old daughter but Mr Bijender, 42, in spite of the difficulty he had in finding a wife, wants to have a son.

While most couples manage to overcome their cultural and linguistic differences, there have been cases where the marriages did not work and the girls returned home.

Ms Jagmati Sangwan, state president of Janwadi Mahila Samity, an organisation working to advance women's rights, said that when the trend started nearly a decade ago, many women were sexually exploited and physically abused.

'But things are changing,' she said. 'The numbers of women from other states are increasing and those who came before give the new arrivals a sense of security and confidence.'

Dr Ravinder Kaur, associate professor of sociology at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi told The Times of India: 'It is an alien world for these girls and the first few years of marriage can prove to be tough.'

She said she had come across over 40 cases of 'across-region' marriages in a survey of five districts of Haryana.

Mr M.D. Nair, chairman of Payyannur municipality in north Kerala that has seen dozens of its women marrying men from Haryana, attributed the phenomenon to poverty and the demands for dowry by grooms in Kerala, the paper said.

In the village of Sorkhi, also in Haryana, 33-year-old farmer Rambir's neighbour married a woman from Kerala. The woman showed Mr Rambir a photograph of her girlfriend back home.

He liked what he saw and he and his family visited her in Kerala. They got married early this year.

Mr Rambir's mother, Mrs Sunita, was quoted in The Times of India as saying: 'There is no question of asking for a dowry now or being choosy about caste. We are happy so long as a daughter-in-law comes into the house.'

Earlier, only older men or those who needed a second wife would seek a bride from outside the community, she said. 'Today, even young men from Haryana's neighbouring states of Punjab and Uttar Pradesh are seeking brides from Kerala and other states,' said Dr Kaur.

The dearth of women and shrinking landholdings have also resulted in polyandry in some rural areas of Punjab, where brothers share a wife, brought over from other regions.

'There are three to four cases in every village, and in some areas the number goes up to 10 or 15,' said Mr Kuldip Singh Deep, a Punjab social activist.

'The problem is a Hydra-headed thing,' sociologist Vasanthi Raman, a fellow of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, told The Sunday Times, referring to the many-headed monster in Greek mythology.

'The devaluation of the girl child and 'masculination' of the society will have long-term consequences,' she said, referring to the increased proportion of males in society.

Other experts warn that the situation will only get worse. 'The few women that are left can be subjected to violence, widows may be forced to remarry within the family, and families may push for polyandrous unions without the consent of the woman,' Dr Kaur said. (PUSH Journal)

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Indian Committee of Youth Organizations (ICYO) is the network organization, committed for capacity building and developing mutual cooperation and understanding amongs youth organizations, youth groups. 

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