Female infanticide refers to the deliberate killing of newborn baby girls. Sadly, this practice has existed in many parts of the world and continues to occur even today. At its core, female infanticide is rooted in gender inequality, where women and girls are viewed as less valuable than men in deeply patriarchal societies. In modern times, this discrimination also appears in the form of sex-selective abortions, which are used to control or manipulate gender ratios.
In 1978, anthropologist Laila Williamson studied data from across the globe and found that infanticide had occurred on every continent. Her research showed that the practice was not limited to any one culture or stage of development. It existed among hunter-gatherer communities as well as advanced societies. Rather than being rare, female infanticide has historically been alarmingly common.
The practice has been documented among Indigenous communities in Australia, Northern Alaska, and South Asia. Scholar Barbara Miller argued that female infanticide was nearly universal, including in parts of the Western world. She observed that it was especially common in regions where women were not involved in agricultural work and where dowry systems placed a financial burden on families raising daughters.
Even in the nineteenth century, the issue was noted by Charles Darwin, who wrote in The Descent of Man in 1871 that female infanticide was widespread among Aboriginal tribes in Australia.
Today, female infanticide and related practices remain closely linked to poverty, lack of education, and the low social status of women. Countries such as India, Pakistan, and parts of West Africa continue to struggle with the consequences of these deep-rooted inequalities.
In 1990, economist Amartya Sen highlighted the scale of the problem when he estimated that Asia had nearly 100 million missing women. These were women who should have been alive but were not, due to neglect, discrimination, and gender-based violence. As Sen poignantly noted, these missing women tell a terrible story of inequality and neglect, quietly revealing how systemic bias can shape life and death itself.
Female infanticide in India
Female infanticide in India has a long and troubling history that stretches back several centuries. The practice has been linked to a range of social, economic, and cultural factors. These include widespread poverty, the burden of the dowry system, births outside marriage, the killing of infants with physical deformities, periods of famine, lack of social and healthcare support, and maternal health issues such as postpartum depression.
Although infanticide is a criminal offence in India, it remains largely underreported. One major reason is the absence of reliable data and the social stigma surrounding such cases. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, around 100 cases of male and female infanticide were reported in 2010, translating to an official rate of less than one case per million people. However, experts widely believe that the actual number is significantly higher.
Female infanticide, along with the practice of sex-selective abortion, has contributed to India’s increasingly skewed gender ratio. Census data since 1991 has shown a growing imbalance between the number of males and females. While these practices play a significant role, other social and demographic factors have also influenced this disturbing trend.
Conceptual Overview
Section 315 of the Indian Penal Code defines infanticide as the killing of an infant aged between zero and one year. This legal definition helps distinguish infanticide from other offences against children, such as foeticide and murder.
However, the meaning of infanticide is not uniform across academic studies. Some scholars strictly follow the legal definition laid down in the Penal Code. Others adopt a broader interpretation. For example, researchers Renu Dube, Reena Dube, and Rashmi Bhatnagar, who identify as postcolonial feminists, use the term to cover a wider range of gender-based killings, extending from foeticide to femicide at various stages of life.
Anthropologist Barbara Miller has taken an even more expansive approach. For the sake of analysis, she uses the term infanticide to include all non-accidental deaths of children up to approximately fifteen or sixteen years of age, which is often regarded as the end of childhood in rural India. She also notes that infanticide can occur in different forms. It may be an overt act, such as physical violence, or a passive one, resulting from neglect, starvation, or deliberate denial of care.
In addition, the killing of a newborn within the first twenty-four hours of birth is often referred to as neonaticide and is sometimes studied as a distinct phenomenon.
History
From the pre-colonial into the colonial period, British officials in India gradually became aware of the practice of female infanticide. The earliest recorded observation dates to 1789 in the Benares State, in present-day Uttar Pradesh, where Jonathan Duncan, then the East India Company Resident, noted its prevalence among members of the ruling Rajput clan. Subsequently, in 1817, officials in the Jamnagar kingdom of modern-day Gujarat reported that the practice was so deeply entrenched among the Jadeja Rajputs that entire taluks existed in which no female children of the clan were found.
By the mid-nineteenth century, a magistrate stationed in north-west India claimed that for several hundred years no daughters had been raised in the strongholds of the Rajahs of Mynpoorie. It was only after the intervention of a District Collector in 1845 that the Rajput ruler there permitted a daughter to survive. British administrators also identified the practice among other high-caste communities across northern, western, and central India, including the Ahirs, Bedis, Gurjars, Jats, Khatris, Lewa Kanbis, Mohyal Brahmins, and Patidars.
A review of colonial-era scholarship by Miller indicates that the majority of reported cases of female infanticide occurred in north-western India, where the practice was widespread, though not universal among all groups. David Arnold, a scholar associated with the Subaltern Studies group who extensively examined contemporary sources, notes that various methods of direct infanticide were employed. These reportedly included poisoning with opium, strangulation, and suffocation. Poisonous substances such as the root of Plumbago rosea and arsenic were also used to induce abortions, with arsenic paradoxically serving at times as an aphrodisiac and a treatment for male impotence.
Among Rajputs, acts of direct infanticide were typically carried out by women—most often the mother herself or a nurse. The administration of poison, in particular, was a method closely associated with women. Arnold characterizes this form of killing as “often murder by proxy,” whereby men remained physically and morally distanced from the act, enabling them to claim innocence.
Understanding the Causes
According to Marvin Harris, an anthropologist and one of the earliest proponents of cultural materialism, the killing of legitimate children occurred primarily among Rajputs and other elite land-owning and warrior groups. Harris argues that the underlying rationale was largely economic. These groups sought to avoid the fragmentation of land and wealth among multiple heirs and to escape the financial burden of dowries. Daughters and sisters were expected to marry men of comparable status, which threatened the concentration of wealth and power within a lineage, whereas concubines and their children did not pose such risks and were therefore more likely to be allowed to survive. Harris further contends that in the context of a pre-industrial society, where villages depended heavily on warriors, female children were systematically devalued. The combined effects of warfare-related male mortality and female infanticide, he suggests, functioned as a necessary mechanism of population control.
Sociobiologists advance an alternative explanation that directly challenges Harris’s interpretation. Indeed, Harris’s engagement with the issue of infanticide emerged partly from his broader critique of the sociobiological hypothesis of the “procreative imperative.” This hypothesis, rooted in nineteenth-century evolutionary thought and the principle of natural selection, holds that biological differences between men and women enabled elite men to maximize reproductive success by favoring male offspring, whose reproductive capacity was assumed to be greater. According to this view, elite lineages would expand more rapidly by investing in sons. Harris rejects this explanation as flawed, arguing that elite families possessed sufficient resources to support both male and female children. Consequently, Harris and scholars such as William Divale interpret female infanticide as a strategy to limit population growth, whereas sociobiologists, including Mildred Dickemann, regard the same practice as a means of promoting demographic expansion.
A third perspective is offered by anthropologist Kristen Hawkes, who critiques both Harris’s cultural materialist explanation and the sociobiological approach. In response to Harris, she argues that the most effective way to increase the number of male warriors would have been to maintain a larger population of women capable of bearing children. She further notes that a greater number of women within a village would enhance opportunities for forming marriage alliances with other communities. In challenging the procreative imperative theory, Hawkes observes that if affluent elites sought to maximize reproduction, the logical corollary would be that poorer groups would attempt to restrict population growth. This, in theory, would have resulted in the practice of male infanticide among poorer communities—a pattern for which there is little historical evidence.
Regional Patterns and Religious Affiliation
The decennial censuses conducted in India between 1881 and 1941 consistently recorded a skewed sex ratio, with males outnumbering females throughout the period. This imbalance was particularly pronounced in northern and western India. In the northern regions, the sex ratio—measured as the number of males per 100 females—ranged from 110.2 to 113.7 over the sixty-year span. Western India also exhibited a persistent male surplus, with ratios for all age groups varying between 105.8 and 109.8 males per 100 females.
According to Visaria, the deficit of females was especially marked among the Muslim population, exceeded only by that observed among Sikhs. In contrast, southern India constituted a notable exception, reporting an overall surplus of females. Scholars have partly attributed this divergence to the selective out-migration of males from the region.
Across India as a whole, regional sex ratios and the degree of male excess were highest among Muslim populations during the period from 1881 to 1941. Moreover, the sex ratio of each region generally corresponded with the proportion of Muslims in its population. An exception to this pattern was eastern India, which recorded a relatively low overall sex ratio despite having a comparatively high percentage of Muslims.
Visaria further notes that if regions now forming part of modern Pakistan—such as Baluchistan, the North-West Frontier Province, and Sind—are excluded from the analysis, both regional and national sex ratios for the remaining parts of India during the 1881–1941 period show improvement in favour of females, resulting in a narrower gap between male and female populations.
State Action
In 1991, the Girl Child Protection Scheme was introduced as a long-term financial incentive aimed primarily at rural families. Participation in the scheme required families to fulfil certain conditions, including the sterilisation of the mother. Upon meeting these obligations, the state deposited ₹2,000 into a government-managed fund in the name of the girl child. The fund was intended to mature to ₹10,000 and was released to the beneficiary when she reached the age of twenty, to be used either for marriage expenses or for pursuing higher education.
In 1992, the Government of India launched the “baby cradle scheme,” which enabled families to surrender infants anonymously for adoption without undergoing formal legal procedures. While the scheme was praised for potentially saving the lives of thousands of baby girls, it was also criticised by human rights groups, who argued that it encouraged child abandonment and reinforced the low social status of women. Initially implemented as a pilot project in Tamil Nadu, cradles were placed outside state-run health facilities. The Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu further supplemented the initiative by offering financial incentives to families with more than one daughter. During the first four years of the scheme, 136 baby girls were placed for adoption.
Despite these efforts, 1,218 cases of female infanticide were reported in 2000, leading to the conclusion that the scheme had failed. As a result, it was discontinued, although it was reinstated the following year.
Data from the 2011 Census revealed a significant decline in the child sex ratio (CSR). In response to this alarming trend, the Government of India introduced the Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao (BBBP) initiative. The programme seeks to address gender discrimination by ensuring the survival, protection, and education of girls.
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