www.savethebabygirl.com: Saving a skewed society

Kolhapur district has the worst sex ratio in Maharshtra—839 girls to every 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group,according to the 2001 Census. So on Women’s Day,March 8,Laxmikant Deshmukh,who had taken over as District Collector of Kolhapur a month ago,took a vow in public,saying he would do something about this blot.

“When I said it,I didn’t know how I would do it. I just knew that this problem had to be tackled,” says Deshmukh,55.

He realised that ‘educating’ the public wasn’t going to get him quick results. So Deshmukh decided to focus on the other end of the problem—the proliferation of sonography machines in the district and the rampant violation of the PCPNDT Act by medical practitioners. His idea was simple: linking the sonography clinics in the district with http://www.savethebabygirl.com,a website that monitors ultrasound sonography centres in the district and which won the district administration the NASSCOM award for Social Innovation.

“There are 232 sonography centres in the district today. The thing to do obviously was to clamp down on these centres. But how? And one day,it suddenly struck me. If technology was enabling people to know the sex of their unborn child,technology would have the answer too,” says Deshmukh.

On August 15,the district collectorate launched the website and linked it to each of the 232 sonography clinics in the district. “Each centre was given a user id and a password. At the end of the day,they were required to fill in details of every sonography test they did. The data helped us get details like how many of the women coming for sonography were mothers of girls,the age of the foetus at the time of the sonography,how many tests were done after six weeks (when the sex can be determined through sonographs) and so on,” says Deshmukh.

The real results came in the form of an amazing reversal of statistics. Within six months of the launch of the site,there was a perceptible increase in the number of baby girls born in Kolhapur. From 43 girls born in October 2009,the number went up to 108 in March 2010. In one month,the site recorded over 10,000 entries from the 232 centres.

Even as accolades poured in,Deshmukh and his team knew that while this was a good first step,they needed to do much more.

“We still had no way of ascertaining that the doctors were not under reporting the sonographies. This was a point that rankled,” says Dr Ravindra Nitturkar,civil surgeon Kolhapur,who assisted Deshmukh in the project.

What followed was the Silent Observer. The Observer is an embedded processor capable of capturing videos and images displayed on the monitors of sonography machines.

“It is fitted on the cable connecting the machine and the monitor and once fitted,there is no way it can be detached without it recording such a move,” says Girish Lad,CEO of Magnum Opus,whose team came up with the device.