Successful February 2012 Brown Bag seminar on Indian Gendercide

On 16 February 2012, the first SASNET Brown Bag lunch seminar for the spring semester 2012 was successfully held. It was also the first seminar organised in collaboration with Arbetarnas Bildningsförbund (ABF) Lund, and Lunds Konsthall, and quite a large crowd of people, both academic and non-academic, turned up at the wonderful hall at Lunds Konsthall to listen to Professor Emeritus Neelambar Hatti from the Department of Economic History, Lund University. He lectured on the ongoing gendercide, as he calls it, and deteriorating sex ratio figures in India, with the provocative title ”Where have all the girls gone?” . Professor Hatti described how particularly during the past three decades, a new form of gender discrimination has become a frightening reality in India. In an overwhelmingly patriarchal society, girls are considered expensive and not desirable. Desire for smaller family and a strong preference for boys coupled with easily available and affordable prenatal sex determination techniques the incidence of sex selective abortion of female fetuses has reached alarming a proportion.

Neelambar Hatti with Inger Sondén Haellqist, Vikas Choudhry and Julia   Velkova after the seminar.

India’s 2011 census shows a serious decline in the number of girls below the age of six. It is feared that as many as eight million female fetuses may have been aborted in the past decade alone. As a result India has a biologically unnatural excess of males with serious consequences, not only for women but for the society as a whole.

SASNET organises Brown Bag lunch seminars since 2011, but from the spring 2012 in a new format, in collaboration with Sweden’s  largest adult liberal education association ABF, and the municipal art gallery of Lund (Konsthallen). As usual, lectures are given by eminent Lund University researchers working on South Asia related projects, and are held once a month on Thursdays. Coming seminars are held on 15 March (Kristina Myrvold), 19 April (Magnus Larsson), and 9 May 2012 (Mariam Meynert).
More about previous and coming
SASNET Brown Bag seminars.

Programme for the spring 2012 (as a pdf-file)