Accusations of an elderly British Indian couple abandoning their IVF twins because they were girls may have shocked Britain but it barely raises an eyebrow in India.

Such is the traditional stigma against female children here that female infanticide and foeticide are commonplace — even among the relatively affluent urban middle classes.

Fertility treatment is also completely unregulated in India, allowing growing numbers of foreigners and non-resident Indians to skirt their own laws — and pay a fraction of the price back home.

So it comes as no surprise that the couple accused of abandoning their twins had undergone IVF treatment in India after being turned down in Britain because they were too old.

Nor is it surprising that the parents, who were born in India but lived in Britain, told hospital doctors that they did not want the “wrong sex” babies immediately after the children were born.

The killing of newborn girls has long been common in rural India, where a daughter is perceived as a financial burden because her family has to pay a hefty dowry when she is married.

Boys, by contrast, are regarded as future breadwinners and heirs who will look after their parents in their old age.

Since the advent of ultrasound technology, abortion of female foetuses has also become increasingly prevalent, not only in rural communities but also among city-dwellers.

An international team of researchers estimated in 2006 that 10 million girls had been aborted in India over the past two decades. The Indian Medical Association says that five million are aborted annually.

The result is an increasingly severe gender imbalance, with only 927 women for every 1,000 men in India, according to the 2001 census, down from 945 women a decade earlier.

The worst imbalance is in Indian cities where those with money have ready access to private doctors, who take bribes to skirt a 1994 ban on ultrasound gender tests.

The gender imbalance in Indian cities is also being magnified by declining rates of fertility which doctors attribute to stress, an unhealthy diet, obesity and a lack of exercise.

Fertility treatment is still relatively new to India: about 15,000 couples underwent it last year out of a population of 1.1 billion.

But the number of foreign couples undergoing IVF treatment in India has ballooned from just 50 in 2004 to more than 500 last year.

Almost all of them go to specialist private clinics, such as the Rotunda Centre for Human Reproduction in Bombay, many of which have been set up by Indian doctors trained in Britain or elsewhere in the West.

Gautam Allahabadia, Medical Director of the Rotunda Centre, said that he had treated 80 foreign couples there so far this year alone.

Most are attracted by the low prices, which average about $2,000 to $2,500 although the Rotunda Centre has recently set up a “budget IVF clinic” where treatment costs as little as $1,000.

Some, however, are drawn by the lack of regulation as there is no law governing IVF treatment in India.

Instead, clinics such as the Rotunda centre operate under a loose set of guidelines drawn up by the Indian Council of Medical Research.

They say that IVF treatment should not normally be given to a woman under 20 years old, but they do not set any maximum age limit.

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