WHEN Bhanvi Kumri found out that the child she was carrying was a girl, she burst into tears. “I wanted to get rid of it,” she said. Her first child had been a girl and when she became pregnant a second time, she prayed that it would be a boy. “A girl is OK, but a boy is a necessity in India.”

In the end she had the baby, but she and her wealthy politician husband vowed that next time they would not leave it to chance. Four months ago, in a swanky Bombay fertility clinic, she underwent in vitro fertilisation to weed out female embryos and implant two males, the future heirs to her husband’s business.

Aniruddha Malpani, who treated Bhanvi, is an unapologetic crusader for what he calls “family balancing” although he admits he has yet to treat a patient seeking to have a girl. “People used to kill baby girls,” Dr Malpani argues. “This technology means they don’t have to do that anymore.”

Prakash Kakodkar, a gynaecologist in Bombay who admits to carrying out sexselective abortions long after they were outlawed, goes further, arguing that it is women who benefit through sex selection. “If a woman isn’t able to produce a male, she’s badly treated and you want to help her,” Dr Kakodkar said. “Girl children are also very badly treated if they are not wanted.”

India’s preference for male children is nothing new and the history of female infanticide in rural villages is long and brutal, with girl babies smothered, drowned or simply abandoned by poor families desperate to have a boy.

The bias is deep-rooted, born of traditions such as dowry-giving, the loss of daughters to their husbands’ families after marriage and the belief that only a son can light his parents’ funeral pyre.

Now, however, officials are detecting an alarming new trend: the spread of the gender imbalance up the social scale, assisted by new technology available to the increasing number of Indians with money to burn. The fear is that the most influential classes are setting the trend for practices contributing to a dramatic sex imbalance that could throw up all manner of social ills in years to come.

The ratio of girls to boys in India has been on a steady slide throughout the past century, but when census officials compiled the results of their latest survey, they were met with a rude surprise. The most pronounced drop in the number of girls under the age of six was no longer in rural areas but in the cities. And not just any neighbourhoods, but in the wealthiest enclaves, where the educated elite live.

In the past decade, the number of girls under six in Delhi has slipped from 945 per 1,000 boys to 865. Yet areas that include some of the most exclusive neighbourhoods showed as few as 796 girls.

“We were shocked by the results,” Suman Prashar, a senior census official, said. But the conclusions were not hard to draw. “These are the areas best-equipped with medical technology and these wealthy, educated people are misusing it to ensure they don’t have girls.”

The preimplantation genetic determination method used by Bhanvi is legal, at present, but the method most couples use to guarantee a male heir is not. At “kitty parties” — social gatherings in the leafy enclaves of south Delhi — wealthy housewives swap names of medical practioners willing to break the law to perform ultrasound sex testing and sex-selective abortions.

A recent crackdown has made doctors more cautious, but has also had the effect of driving prices up.

A prominent sign outside the Chopra ultrasound clinic in Delhi’s smart Jorbagh suburb proclaims that no sex testing is done there, but that does not stop the flood of inquiries from the city’s ladies-who-lunch.

“One excuse they’ll give is that their husband is going to London on business and he wants to know whether to buy blue or pink clothes,” Avnish Chopra, a doctor, said. “They may be educated, but they have the same cultural mindset as villagers who abandon their babies in rice fields to die.”

Already villages in Haryana and Punjab, the traditional bastions of female infanticide, are suffering the consequences of two decades of systematic eradication of females, with young men forced to buy in brides from elsewhere or even share a wife with their brothers. Sexual violence is also on the rise amid frustrated single men. It may only be a matter of time until upscale society is struck by its own set of consequences.

“We’ll feel it in about 20 years’ time when these children come to marry,” Promilla Kapur, a sociologist, said. “The rigidity of the caste system may have to melt, but it will do nothing to improve the situation of women because the problem springs from the fact they are undervalued.”

The saddest thing, campaigners say, is that it is educated women themselves who are helping to perpetuate the old attitudes. “What are they saying about themselves if they are so desperate for sons?” Ms Prashar asked in exasperation. “And when it’s the influential classes that are doing this, it’s extremely worrying. What hope is there for the rest?” Happily pregnant with her male twins, Bhanvi was unrepentant about her own contribution to India’s gender time bomb. “Whatever is available, one buys,” she shrugged. “If you want a boy, you buy a boy.”

And as the Indian middle class swells year by year, more and more are queueing to do so.

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