In a move that could become controversial and be seen as an invasion of privacy, Haryana’s health department has started equipping all community health centres across the state with a “Mother and Child Tracking” system that will register and track all expectant mothers for the duration of their pregnancies.
Under this plan it will be mandatory for all village-based health workers and anganwadi staff to register every woman who becomes pregnant, after which the software-driven tracking system will monitor their status until the birth of a child. The tracker will then follow each mother and child through the process of inoculation.
The Haryana health authorities are certain to raise even more eyebrows with their plan to make all information about the medical condition of each registered mother and child available online in the public domain.
The department intends to use the pregnancy tracker to identify and initiate legal action in cases where couples or families try to illegally abort the child. “The officers of the department would regularly monitor the information regarding pregnant women and children and take effective steps to check the menace of female foeticide in the state,” a spokesman said.
This, incidentally, is not the first time that state authorities in northern India have tried to police motherhood in a bid to reverse the growing incidence of sex determination tests and female foeticide. An identical, albeit highly controversial, attempt was made in Punjab’s Nawanshahar district in 2006 when its then deputy commissioner set up an independent office to track all pregnancies and ensure that each one resulted in the birth of a child.
While initially successful, deputy commissioner Krishan Kumar’s initiative quickly collapsed with families sending newly-pregnant women to the house of a relative or friend outside the district until the sex of the foetus became known. The district also saw a fresh wave of infanticides — with families denying healthcare and nutrition to baby girls and allowing them to die.
In fact, 18 of 1,200 children born at the end of Mr Kumar’s first monitoring phase died within the first three months. Incredulously, all the 18 were girls!
The Nawanshahar experiment was widely criticised both for its intrusive nature and invading personal privacy, as well as its one-dimensional approach — trying to enforce the law without any accompanying initiatives to change Punjab’s age-old patriarchal mindset and the deep-rooted social preference for male children.