RENDERED illegible by layers of grime, most shop signs in Delhi serve little obvious purpose. But on a filthy side street in the Greater Kailash district, there is an obvious exception. A bright green neon sign above a busy textile workshop advertises a “fertility clinic” — a thoroughly misleading description.

Inside, on a PVC sofa, sits Gurpreet Kaur, 26, who admits she has already had two abortions after illegal antenatal tests showed that she was expecting girls. Today she is awaiting her third scan in as many years, having earlier gone to a Sikh temple to pray for a boy.

This clinic is not one of the illegal abortion clinics so common in Delhi’s backstreets, but it certainly feeds their business.

Since the advent of ultrasound equipment, hundreds of so-called fertility clinics have opened. Ostensibly they offer scanning services for expectant mothers; in reality most offer nothing more than gender identification. And for many, that represents the first heartbreaking step towards abortion.

A 1994 law bans the use of technology to determine the sex of unborn children, along with the termination of pregnancies on the basis of gender, but these clinics offer a seemingly legitimate façade for a multibillion-pound racket to which the police — for a price — usually turn a blind eye.

Gender determination is big business. Male offspring are typically regarded as a blessing — future breadwinners who will look after parents in old age — but many parents still see girls as a financial burden, and the consequences are chilling.

According to a study published yesterday in The Lancet, more than ten million female foetuses may have been aborted in India in the past twenty years after gender checks.

Shirish Sheth, of the Breach Candy hospital in Bombay, a co-author of the Lancet report, said: “To have a daughter is socially and emotionally accepted if there is a son, but a daughter’s arrival is often unwelcome if the couple already have a daughter.

“Daughters are regarded as a liability. Because she will eventually belong to the family of her future husband, expenditure on her will benefit others. In some communities where the custom of dowry prevails, the cost of her dowry could be phenomenal.”

She added: “We conservatively estimate that prenatal sex determination and selective abortion accounts for 500,000 missing girls yearly. If this practice has been common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound became widespread, then a figure of ten million missing female births would not be unreasonable.”

Population censuses in India show that the number of girls has fallen steadily. In 1981 there were 962 girls for every 1,000 boys up to the age of 6. In 2001 there were only 927.

Gurpreet Kaur, whose husband is a computer programmer, says it is her in-laws, not her husband, who are pressuring her to have a boy. “If I don’t produce one I have failed in their eyes. They tell me they need a boy, a breadwinner, to secure the future of the family.”

The owner of the Greater Kailash clinic, who refused to be identified, said that selective pregnancies were common not just among poorer Indians, but in wealthy families too. “We don’t perform abortions. We carry out scans. It is then up the family what they do,” she told The Times. “A normal ultrasound costs about 200 rupees (£3) but when you want to disclose the sex of the child, it varies from 800 to 1,200. We get hundreds of customers every week. Many can barely afford to pay for the scans but they see them as an investment.”

She added: “Every doctor in India will admit that sex-selective abortions are being performed with a recklessness that is bound to have an effect on the population. Urban areas are much worse than the rural ones. In the rural area people often wait but the urbanites — modern Indians — want to check out on the sex of the child as soon as they can.”

Neelam Gupta, senior programme officer at the Indian Council of Child Welfare, believes the present law, which imposes very tough restrictions on abortion, is useless, and that technology has created a population time bomb. “The discovery of the ultrasound technique and its cheap availability has proved to be the nemesis of the female foetus in India.”

FROM BATS TO BABIES

A hand-held ultrasound device for monitoring the foetus is now available online for around £150

OTHER COUNTRIES WITH A GENDER GAP

CHINA: In the early 1980s, the ratio of boys to girls was 108.5 to 100, rising to 111 boys in 1990, and is close to 120 today

PAKISTAN: 1,500 babies abandoned every year, 80 per cent of them female

SOUTH KOREA: Up to 30,000 female foetuses are aborted annually, producing a ratio of 110 boys born for every 100 girls

NEPAL: Ratio of last-born children reported to be 146 boys for every 100 girls

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