District health officials in Satara, Maharashtra, are planning
to identify and rename hundreds of little girls saddled with the
name Nakushi -- which literally means "Unwanted" -- by their
parents, the Indian Express reports. The idea is to drive home
the message that despite the remaining social evils of dowry,
bride-burning and discrimination, daughters are just as valuable
as sons and deserve the same love and attention, the paper said.
In 1990, Amartya Sen famously wrote of the 100 million missing
women, especially in Asia, and of how these numbers “tell us,
quietly, a terrible story of inequality and neglect leading to
excess mortality of women”. Twenty years on, much has changed —
but an incident like this is a reminder of much that has
stubbornly lingered. Apart from the extreme practices of
foeticide and infanticide, girl children are more subtly
discriminated against with parental bias, lack of nurturing and
nutrition, unfair resource allocation and cultural hostility. If
they are sent to school, the