INDIA: Female infanticide and foeticide are leaving the country with a large number gap between the sexes, writes Rahul Bedi in New Delhi
The shortage of eligible single women has led some poverty-stricken husbands in western India into "renting out" their wives to other men at a monthly rate.
According to reports quoting police officials, a tribesman in western Gujarat state allowed his farm labourer wife, a mother of two, to live with her landlord boss for 8,000 rupees (€138) a month.
"We cannot take action against this activity as no one comes forward to lodge a complaint," deputy superintendent of police Naresh Muniy, from Ankleshwar, 170km south of the state capital Gandhinagar, said.
"We do not rule out the possibility of even minors being married off to the rich," he added.
Penurious families and middlemen have cashed in on this shortage of women by "selling" off needy tribal wives to wealthy men in Gujarat, one of India's richest states.
Women's rights activists said many "buyers" were unable to find women of their own caste to marry and were using the poor wives as "temporary consorts" for anywhere between 500 rupees (€8.60 and Rs60,000 (€1,035).
The price, activists said, depended on how desperate the woman's family were.
Brokers who organise the deal earn up to Rs200,000 (€3,450) a month from finding and selling wives to single men in the state of some 50 million people, officials claimed.
Gujarat, like the rest of India, faces a shortage of women.
According to the 2001 census, it had 921 women for every 1,000 men due mostly to female infanticide. India has a long and wretched history of this pernicious practice and also of girls being poisoned, suffocated, drowned, starved or simply abandoned and left to die.
Girls are considered a liability, as expensive dowries have to be paid at their weddings, which cost a tidy fortune.
Even the poorest of peasants are under social pressure to make a bold statement by organising lavish weddings, often by taking usurious loans.
Boys, on the other hand, are deemed an asset.
Even the most ineligible of them comes at a premium, commanding a dowry that in countless instances extends over years to a steady demand for money and other goods on the girl's family.
Refusal to comply often leads to suicide or "bride-burning", a euphemism for murder on grounds of avarice.
According to a population expert, having fewer women does not mean that their importance or value increases.
On the contrary, they are subjected to increased domestic violence and abuse, with brides being forcibly cloistered inside their homes to cook and produce male offspring, she added.
A marriage crisis like Gujarat's is afflicting the rich northern states of Punjab and Haryana, where thousands of young men are failing to find brides following nearly three decades of sex determination tests followed by female foeticide. The situation is so grim in these neighbouring provinces that families are resorting to "buying" girls from poorer states like Bihar and Bengal in the east.
In a related instance of sexual discrimination, human rights activists and opposition party leaders have demanded that a senior army general be fired for his remarks to a local newspapers that women officers have no place in the Indian army.
"Ideally, we would like to have gentlemen and not lady officers," Lt Gen S Pattabhiraman, vice-chief of the army, told a local newspaper at the weekend after a woman officer committed suicide.
There are only about 1,000 women in India's 1.1 million-strong army but they serve only in non-combat roles and in the medical corps.
"His statements are outrageous," Suhasini Ali of the All India Democratic Women's Association said. "Gen Pattabhiraman should not be in a position where he can influence policy," she added.