INDIA CROSSING CONTINENTS


Lucy: 	
The groom is on his way to the banqueting hall where his wedding 
will take place, he is sat high up above me on red silk cushions and 
his carriage is covered in garlands of jasmine and drawn by two 
white horses with feathered headdresses and gold brocaded saddles. 

I’m here with Loveena Tandon, an Indian journalist who’s helping 
me.  Loveena this is the most spectacular wedding how many 
weddings are there like this in Delhi?

Loveena: 
I have heard of more lavish wedding than this, for example people 
could book two five star hotels, totally give Mercedes and have a  
week long ceremony, a variety of functions. 

Lucy:
And how much do you reckon this one cost?

Loveena :
This wedding must have costed the daughter’s family around 
£80,000.

Lucy: 
£80,000?

Loveena: 
Yes 80 thousand pounds It’s not about only paying for the wedding 
or the party it is also about luring the guy, you have to buy him off  
through you know, it could be cash, it could be gold jewellery,  it 
could be cars it could be anything that every parent can afford and a 
little more.  Everyone comes with a price for example a top civil 
servant would cost anything  50 lakhs,  so  it’s about 68 thousand 
pounds, a doctor for example costs around 27 thousand pounds 

Lucy: 
These aren’t official prices are they?

Loveena:
No, no these are not actually show room prices but every man comes 
with a price tag and you actually buy a bridegroom,  this is called 
dowry which is illegal but I guess that is why we call it gifts. 

Lucy: 
The 600 wedding guests have now all gone inside to a palatial 
banquet and the bride’s joined the groom on a red platform in the 
middle of the room. She is wearing a crimson lenga which is shot 
through with gold thread and is heavily jewelled , I’ve been told that 
the skirt alone weighs ten kilos. 

VOICE:
Three cheers for Nitin and Namrata 

Lucy: 
This is usually one of the happiest days of a woman’s life but all too 
often it marks the beginning of a nightmare. Grooms are getting 
greedier, dowry demands are going up and up and all this is now 
causing untold misery around the country. Many Indian families 
actually dread their weddings and the debts that go with them but if 
they don’t pay up their daughters face rejection, physical abuse and 
worse. 

In this week’s Crossing Continents, we travel to different parts of 
India to find out the high price being paid by girls, sometimes before 
they are even born. And we tell the story of an unlikely national 
heroine. 

Nisha:
This is a video of my wedding which was not possible because of the 
dowry.  Here is the boy.

Lucy: 
That is your groom not to be?

Nisha:
Yuh, this is the boy 

Lucy:  
I am watching the beginning of another marriage ceremony now, 
this time on video. This bride, a pretty and petite young woman, is 
also decked in jewels with intricate patterns of henna on her hands 
and feet. Nisha Sharma, a 21 year old software engineer, was excited 
about starting a new life with Munish Dalal.  It was an arranged 
marriage.  Nisha’s father had found the groom through a Sunday 
newspaper ad.  

Nisha Sharma:
At that time I thought he was a very smart personality he was hard 
working  I thought because  I want a husband like he should be 
hardworking and serious about his future – many things were same.

Lucy:
What sort of things were the same? 

Nisha:
Like the colour, he likes red black and white and I also like red 
black and 

Lucy: 
So your first impressions on the whole were fairly positive?

Nisha:
On the whole family the impression was very positive. 
  
Lucy:  
Munish’s family insisted they didn’t want any money or gifts,  just 
Nisha.  But Nisha’s father, a factory boss, knew they were expected.  
So he bought the couple dozens of household appliances and even a 
brand new car. The giving and taking of dowry has been illegal in 
India for 40 years.    But what’s a dowry and what’s just wedding 
presents? Devv Dutt Sharma is Nisha’s dad.   

Devv:
I went through a lot of hardships and I did not want my daughter to 
go through any of such hardships so I was giving this all out of my 
own will. 

Lucy:
So the big day came and the guests arrived , Nisha says as she was 
just preparing to make her grand entrance, Munish and his mother 
demanded a cash dowry of 1.2m rupees or £15,000.  An ugly scene 
broke out round the back of the wedding tent.  Mr Sharma says he 
was insulted, slapped and spat on by the groom’s family.  In a 
mixture of English and Hindi, Nisha tells me what happened next.   

Nisha: 
My phone was in my hand I just dialled 100 number and called the 
police. At that time I thought they have come here to marry with 
money and not with me. 

Loveena translating:
When I was told my father was being abused I didn’t like it at all. 
And if they are insulting my father like this that means they can 
abuse and insult me also.

Lucy:
 Of course if my dad had been treated like that I would have 
cancelled my wedding too.  But in India Nisha’s step was 
revolutionary.  The police came and arrested Munish and his 
mother under the 1961 Anti Dowry Act, a law which is seldom 
enforced.  They are now behind bars and have been refused bail.  
Meanwhile Nisha’s become an overnight celebrity.  Her father has 
backed her all the way. 

Devv:
When they started slapping and pushing me around then I realised 
how greedy and cruel they are. I could not have said it at that point 
in time but I can say it now that if my daughter had got married into 
that family she could have been killed. 

Lucy:
So it was a very narrow escape really?

Devv:
Yeah that is why I feel happy that she is kept and she is with me.  

Lucy:
Nisha was lucky.  These women are singing about an all too familiar 
story, a woman abused by her husband when she couldn’t come up 
with  more dowry.

We are at a centre in Chattapur, a lower middle class suburb of 
Delhi, it’s just one of 7 centre set up by Ranjana Kumari, she is an 
activist and academic who is determined to protect the women 
victims of India’s dowry system. 

Ranjana Kumari :
It is not a practice which is one time demanded at the time of the 
marriage, it is no more that, it continues over the years. So I think 
this is what has led to a practice where the girls are tortured if they 
can’t provide for all this money and if their parents cannot give it 
then they will be tortured, there will be mental harassment there will 
be you know even to the extent that in extreme, extreme cases they 
will be killed because once the girl is killed they will get married 
again and then get more dowry. 

Lucy: 
Balvant is a shy looking woman in a lilac sari. 

Ranjana: 
This woman was married 2 years back. And whatever the family 
could give has given in marriage but after a year they started 
demanding a colour television and a refrigerator her family is not in 
a position to give and then of course they started torturing her and 
tied her and they tried to pour kerosene on her and to burn so she 
ran away. 

Lucy: 
Victoria Hospital please! 

After two hours on a plane I’ve arrived in the southern city of 
Bangalore. That is India’s Silicon Valley, full of computer 
programmers and hi- tech industries and the reason I’ve come here 
is because of a women’s group called Vimochana.  They have done 
this unique study into unnatural deaths of young married women.  
They’ve told me that 3 to 5 women come into the city hospital every 
day suffering from massive burns  and that many of these cases are 
to do with dowry problems. 

I’ve come to check these claims out because frankly I just find them 
very hard to believe. 

You may find the scenes in this hospital disturbing, I did. 

Satiya: 
This is the room where we take the statement. We are sending away 
everybody, it is only the doctors and social workers who talk to her.  

Lucy:  
Satiya is a volunteer here from the women’s group, she works at the 
burns unit and she’s showing me the room women are first brought 
to when they arrive here. This is where they give what’s known as 
the ‘dying declaration’ and often they lie to protect their abusers. 
Satiya tries to give them the courage to speak out.

Satiya: 
This is the latest case, which has come in the morning sustaining 
about 70% of burns. Her name is Sundurahma. 

Lucy:
Sundurahma?

Satiya:
Yes. Aged around 28 years. 

She had quarrelled with her husband all night, at 11:30am her 
husband poured kerosene over her and gave her a matchstick to her 
and asked her to die.

Lucy:
The head doctor has now come to do his rounds he is wearing a 
green facemask.

Sundurhama seems to be in great pain now, she is calling out for her 
mother. I can’t see her face now but I can see her feet and they seem 
to be the only part of her that isn’t badly burnt. Her nails are 
beautifully painted and she has got a silver ring around one of her 
toes. The doctor is lifting up her head trying to make her sit up, he is 
examining the damage to her back. 

Lucy:
She is a very slim girl with a beautiful body but her whole body is 
blackened.
 How long do you think she’ll live?

Satiya:
I don’t know, maybe two three days.

This lady’s name is Asha she’s just married just one and half years. 

Lucy:
Asha is lying in bed in the corner of this burns unit, the lower part 
of her face is blistered.  Next to her head there is a picture of her 
baby girl. What is your baby called?

Asha:
Sneha. 

Lucy:
Sneha. Tell me what happened to you?

What’s she saying? 

Satiya:
She said that previously she had given her jewels that she had got 
from her parents 
place, she had given the earrings, the chain which she’d worn on her 
neck and he started asking for money, which of course she didn’t 
have so in that anger she went to the kitchen and she poured 
kerosene.

I just asked her did your husband give you the matchstick so she 
said yuh he gave me and I lit it. 

Lucy: 
Asha says it was her husband who handed her the matches and she 
set herself ablaze. I find that hard to believe  Indian law says that if 
a woman dies of burns or other injuries within the first seven years 
of marriage , and there’s proof that her husband or his family were 
abusing her then  they should be held responsible.  So will all these 
cases I’ve seen be treated as dowry deaths?  I’ve come to see Donna 
Fernandez, the head of Vimochana Women’s Group, to try and 
make sense of it all. 
  
Donna Fernandez:
We must remember that the incident happens in the in-laws house 
and very often it is the husband and the in-laws that bring her to the 
hospital and all the way to the hospital they tutor and brainwash the 
woman into not revealing the truth. Sometimes they would say 
listen, this will not happen again ,you are going to get well and we 
will live together happily or the husbands say listen, if you say the 
truth they are going to arrest me and put me into jail and then who 
is going to look after the children or I am going to kill your parents 
if you say the truth. 

Lucy: 
How many women die of their burns each month and how many of 
those deaths in the end result in a conviction?

Donna Fernandez: 
The women who die in Victoria hospital that could be anywhere 
between 60 to 70 a month.  I think the bulk of the deaths, they are 
either homicides, that means outright murders or abetted suicides. 
How many of them are ending in convictions it is a very far cry from 
the number of deaths that happen and that is because I think most 
of them are registered as  stove bursts and cooking accidents but if 
they were stove bursts  then all our police stations should be filled 
with stoves. 


Lucy:
We’re back in the car now.  Donna Fernandez tells me that she has 
just got some news from the hospital, what have you heard? 

Donna Fernandez:
Well the news has just come in that there is another woman who has 
been brought into the hospital with very severe burn injuries, almost 
over 90% so we really have to hurry up and try to record her 
statement before it is too late. 

Lucy:
How long will it take to get to the hospital?

Taxi driver:
About 15 minutes madam, I’ll take about 15 minutes.

Lucy
Okay well drive as quickly as you can please. 
 
What’s happened? Why are they crying? 

Man
It’s a burns case, you know.

Lucy:
It’s a burns case? 

Man:
It’s serious she is, that’s why she is so upset.

Lucy:
Oh I’m very sorry. 

Man:
This is mother.

Lucy:
Your daughter is inside in the burns unit? 

Man:
Kerosene burning case. 

Lucy:
Maybe we had better go inside and see what is going on. 

We are going up the stairs, the stairs are awash with dirty water.

Satiya: 
This incident has happened yesterday at 2pm, okay and she has 
come now. And her husband has also accompanied and she tells 
about the stove burst and all …

Lucy: 
Stove burst, they are saying it is a stove burst? 
 
Satiya: 
Yes. Excess oil came out from the stove and got burnt and I’m just 
finding out still more information because husband was also present 
when this happened. 

Lucy: 
Who is that man?

Satiya: 
He is the husband. He’s come and I’m asking him to give bath.

Lucy: 
To give her a bath?

Satiya: 
Let him understand the pain how she is facing and all. 

Lucy: 
He is looking rather sheepish standing there with his arms folded. 
He doesn’t want to come in. 

Now the husband has come into the casualty room. 

Satiya is telling him what to do. 

Satiya:  
He is least bothered husband is just giggling and telling me a stove 
burst you know. So he is least bothered what has happened to his 
wife. 

Lucy: 
And I must say he doesn’t look very upset. 

But they are yelling at him and telling him, give her a bath, give her 
a bath so he is running a bucket full of water. 

And he is dragging his wife onto a chair.
   
A medical orderly has come in now and she is unplaiting what 
remains of this girl’s hair to try to wash it.  The girl is looking 
stunned and they are pouring water over her head. The husband is 
making some feeble attempts to try and help but the orderly just 
says stop, stop, leave it to me I’ll do it, I’ll do it. 

The tiled floor is covered in fragments of her skin. It is coming off in 
big, big strips now like cling film, like blackened cling film.  

I’ve never seen anything like this ever before. This is one of the 
worst things I have ever experienced and I just can’t believe how 
many women it is happening to. We arrived here less than 24 hours 
ago.  Since we’ve been here three new cases have come in all of them 
are hopeless cases, all of these women will die. 

Not all the burned women I saw in Bangalore were dowry cases.  
But all over India dowries have become such an intolerable burden 
that many families are desperate to avoid having girls.  In some 
parts of the country female babies are still being killed at birth. But 
these days far far more girls don’t make it that far. With ultra sound 
technology pregnant women are able to find out if they’re carrying a 
boy or a girl.   When results show they’re going to have a baby girl, 
many women have an abortion.   The tests have been banned but 
what’s known here as female foeticide is still on the increase. Now 
there’s a dramatically lopsided sex ratio.  The problem is at it’s 
worst in the north, the richest part of the country. In Haryana, the 
state I’m driving through now, the ratio is just 861 women to 1000 
men.  I’m heading for Rothak, a town two hours just NW from 
Delhi, to try and find out more about India’s missing girls.

Lucy: 
I’ve just come into the surgical neo natal dept of the Rothak medical 
college with Dr Sajeev Nanda and he is showing me around this 
ward where there are four babies in incubators some of them 
attached to drips. 

What is wrong with this little boy here?

Sajeev Nanda:
The food pipe to communicate with the stomach was not there , it’s 
all congenital birth defects very high incidence of birth defects in 
India.

Lucy:
And why do you think there are so many birth defects in this part of 
India?

Sajeev Nanda:
Ante natal drugs, the drugs which many pregnant mothers may take 
for probably having a male child, given by unqualified, 
unscrupulous people. 

Lucy:
Unscrupulous doctors who tell women that if they swallow these 
medicines they are more likely to conceive a male child?

Sajeev Nanda:
Yes exactly. That may be one of the reasons. 

Lucy:
So all four of the babies in here the neo natal unit they are all boys? 

Sajeev Nanda:
Coincidentally. Yuh they are boys.
  
Lucy: 
But is it just a coincidence?  

Dr Pushpa: 
This is our labour room and here we have to enter after changing 
the clothes, it means you have to wear the caps, gown and you have 
to change the slippers also. 

Lucy: 
Dr Pushpa what a name for an obstetrician is the bossy but friendly 
woman in charge here. 

Lucy:
 Some of the women in this labour ward are lying on their sides 
curled up, sometimes two to a bed. It’s very very hot outside, about 
46 C and in here it is even hotter there’s just a few fans whirring 
over head to give these women relief from the heat, and on one side 
of the room there’s Krishna, about an hour away from giving birth.

Dr Pushpa:
Now she is fully dilated, it means all open, now she has to bear 
down and she has to push out the baby.

Very good push it out very good, very good, yes 

Lucy: 
Krishna’s legs are in the stirrups and she is clinging onto the metal 
bars as hard as she can, the doctor is showing me the baby’s head 
that is just beginning to peek out 

Dr Pushpa:
Very good, you are doing very good yes push it out 

Lucy:
Oh! The head’s out and it is out, the whole baby is out…it’s a girl 
and the paediatrician has taken it away, it’s a girl.

Dr Pushpa:
It’s a girl yeah.  

Lucy: 
Krishna’s just delivered a healthy baby girl but in the last 24 hours 
out of 20 babies born here 12 were boys and just 8 were girls.  This 
kind of ratio happens day after day in this hospital.   All of the 
women we asked up and down the wards denied having sex 
determination tests but with this kind of ratio, Dr Pushpa, they must 
be going on?  

Dr Pushpa:
They may be hiding that they have got the ultrasound done because 
otherwise they should be 50/50, the ratio should be 50/50.   Any 
woman who is delivering a third baby and who is having two 
females most likely got the ultrasound done.  They are so eager for 
the male baby they can do anything.  It’s not very costly, it’s now 
only around  1500 rupees.

Lucy:
That is about 20 pounds for a sex determination test?  So if they are 
desperate enough to find out they will find some way of getting that 
money together you mean? 

Dr Pushpa:
Yeah yeah they will find. Even sell their ornaments also for the 
determination.

Lucy
Their jewellery you mean? 

Dr Pushpa:
Yeah, yeah. 
 
Sabu George
In a few years the situation will be much worse than China or 
Korea. In India we will have the worst ever holocaust of unborn 
girls in human history. 

Lucy:
 Back In Delhi I met Dr Sabu George, a social scientist who has just 
finished an in depth report on sex selective abortions in Rothak 
district.  There used to be adverts everywhere for ultrasounds tests 
which read ‘Spend 500 rupees now and save 500 thousand later on’.  
The message is clear:  no daughter ,no dowry to pay.    A 10 yr old 
law against the tests has just been tightened up and now the 
billboards are gone but it’s just too a lucrative business says Sabu 
George.  

Sabu George:
The virtual absence of medical ethics has contributed very much to 
this practice, doctors are making millions and millions of pounds by 
eliminating girls before birth. It is not one or two doctors doing it. 
10s of 1000s of doctors around the country are promoting sex 
determination for mere greed. 

Lucy: 
And yet it is not much talked about?  

Sabu George:
Most regrettably this enormous problem of sex determination and 
female foeticide is not recognised by any human rights group in the 
world.  Today the foetal stage has become the most dangerous phase 
in a woman’s life and therefore it is important that the human rights 
movement in the world recognise this as a very major violation of 
human rights  in our country.

Lucy: 
But how do you reconcile a woman’s right to choose to have an 
abortion and the need to protect the girl child? 

Sabu George:
We are very clear that our campaign is not against abortion.  Our 
campaign is against sex selective abortion of female foetuses.  The 
choices Indian women today make are not free choices, women are 
forced to determine sex and eliminate girls for their own survival.

Lucy:  
In ten years 28 million women have gone missing from the Indian 
population, that’s roughly equal to all the women in the UK.  Sex 
selective abortions are not the only reason for this but why isn’t the 
government doing more to reverse the trend?  One clue came from I 
D Swami, the Minister of State for Home Affairs.  To my amazement 
the minister himself seemed confused about his country’s laws. 

Lucy: 
Minister, thank you very much for seeing us. There is no question 
that the problem of female foeticide is getting worse because the 
figures, your own figures show it.  1991 there were 961 women per 
1000 men ten years later the figure had gone down to  933. 

ID Swami:
 It is because of the Indian society being as it is. We take son as a 
very big asset and the girl not to that extent because there will be a 
liability, and then you have the right of abortion so they get the sex 
determination and they do not want a girl, that I would agree.  This 
is allowed under the law. 

Lucy: 
I thought it wasn’t allowed under the law…

ID Swami:
Yes I don’t think, yes, you are right, it is not allowed under the law, 
sex determination but when they go for the checking of the pregnant 
women, they come to know.

Lucy:
What do you mean? 

ID Swami:
They come to know whether it is a girl or a boy.

Lucy:
But they are not allowed to know.

ID Swami:
They are not allowed but the doctors do tell. They do come to know 
of it 

Lucy:
So you admit that? 

ID Swami:
If they do come to know of it and they do not want a girl they will 
take recourse to abortion which is allowed. 

Lucy: 
You may not have realised yourself, Minister, until we pointed it out 
but sex determination is illegal.   What is your government doing 
about it?
 
ID Swami:
We, the authorities are taking action against such doctors where 
ever  these complaints come to us but most of the time the 
complaints do not come to the authorities because the husband and 
wife they agree, the parents also agree. When they so not object to it 
what can anybody do? 

Lucy: 
You are smiling minister but it is a serious matter.

ID Swami:
I am smiling because unless and until some particular instance is 
brought to the notice of somebody how do we work? 

Lucy: 
But isn’t the role of your government to make sure this doesn’t 
carry on?

ID Swami:
That is being done.   The private doctors they have been told  that 
sex determination is illegal and if anybody  is doing it, we will cancel 
his licence also and he can be prosecuted also.  The doctors are 
mortally afraid of it.
 
Lucy: 
Can I change the subject a bit and talk about dowry?  The reason 
we came to India at this time is because we were intrigued by the 
case of Nisha Shama. How big a problem, in your opinion is dowry 
nowadays in India?

ID Swami:
In fact there is not a big problem of dowry now, we have  anti dowry 
act  also, this is a very serious offence under the Indian penal code  
and there have been cases alright but  most of the time now the cases 
are very less.  Laws are also very stringent about it. 

Lucy: 
Well you say that the laws are very stringent but it seems that there 
are huge numbers of women that are being maimed and killed 
because of dowry.  I have to show you the newspaper today, the 
Express News line, look this is the front page story, medical student 
death screams of murder  and it’s a dowry murder.   The groom 
demanded a Toyota Qualis and because he didn’t get it, he beat his 
wife to death, what do you think about that? 

ID Swami
Very unfortunate but I say these instances are also in isolation.  How 
many instances of this type you must have you read in the paper, not 
many? 

Lucy:
Well every day that I’ve been here, I have been here a week, every 
day that I’ve opened the papers I’ve found at least one dowry death. 
 
Self defence class:
 One hey!  Two hey! 

Lucy:
After everything I’ve seen and heard it’s a relief to know that some 
young women are fighting back. These girls have spent two weeks 
learning the art of self defence and for them Nisha Sharma has 
clearly been an inspiration.

Lucy:
Have you heard of Nisha Sharma?

Girls:
Yes yes dowry case!

Girl one:
Nisha Sharma did something very great.

Girl two: 
We don’t want to give the dowry, this whole system should be 
stopped. This is the most bad and the most ugly system in this 
country against women because this dowry system has been going on 
for long time and it has become more ugly, uglier day by day.

Another girl: 
And it is like a groom is equal to one woman plus one car.

Lucy: 
Is anyone here planning to give a dowry when they get married? 

Girls:
No, no! 

Chanting slogan:  Mother India is Great!