The Supreme Court has stepped up efforts to punish sex-determination of fetuses under the PNDT Act and said India could ill-afford a socially explosive situation caused by dropping sex ratio which remained a "social affliction and a disease".
"Decrease in sex ratio is a sign of colossal calamity and it cannot be allowed to happen. Concrete steps have to be taken to increase the same so that a social disaster does not befall society," said a bench of Justices Dipak Misra and S K Singh while giving a slew of directions in its 43-page judgment on Tuesday.
The bench gave 16 directions to states and made a request to chief justices of high courts "to constitute a committee of three judges which can periodically oversee progress of cases" under Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act. The court was alarmed by the sex ratio in Delhi (895 female to every 1,000 male child birth), Haryana (880) and Odisha (886) in 2013 and said, "The dropping sex ratio still remains a social affliction and a disease."
To find a true picture on the ground about sex-ratio, the SC made it compulsory for states and Union territories to "maintain a centralized database of civil registration records from all registration units so that information can be made available from the website regarding the number of male and female children births."
The bench gave 16 directions to states and made a request to chief justices of high courts "to constitute a committee of three judges which can periodically oversee progress of cases" under Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act. The court was alarmed by the sex ratio in Delhi (895 female to every 1,000 male child birth), Haryana (880) and Odisha (886) in 2013 and said, "The dropping sex ratio still remains a social affliction and a disease."
To find a true picture on the ground about sex-ratio, the SC made it compulsory for states and Union territories to "maintain a centralized database of civil registration records from all registration units so that information can be made available from the website regarding the number of male and female children births."
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