Can you give examples of concrete actions that came out of the television show?After our episode on female feticide, the government of Rajasthan set up fast-track courts to hear cases against doctors who had been caught on camera indulging in illegal sex-selection abortion.
This is the result of sex-selective abortion female feticide on an extraordinary scale.
Others are more concerned with the diversity of moral practices e.g., monogamy versus polygamy; caring for the aged versus parricide; the forbidding of abortion versus voluntary feticide.
In India, there is a lack of state focus on women, in terms of allocation of resources, in relation to the state's inability to enthuse teaching of female children, its inability to curb female feticide.
The actor Aamir Khan opened a significant chapter in gender politics in the first episode of his show, "Satyamev Jayate" (Truth Triumphs), last month when he took on the topic of female feticide.
"My worry is that we might read too much into this, and ignore the very real challenges — the repressive mind-sets of the khap panchayats," or community elders, "the wave of honor killings, the high rate of female feticide — that women in these states continue to face".
Ms. West also said, "Female feticide will lead to the disenfranchisement of women, who will be made to feel that their only value is in marriage and breeding children," and they will lose their "voice in the public arena as their numbers fall in relation to men".
Meanwhile, the movie and TV industry has been generally silent on this subject, with films exploring female feticide and infanticide being few and far between.
The media attention contrasts with the subject's marginal treatment in mainstream Indian literature and cinema, even though female feticide is not a new phenomenon.
Khaps can play a positive role in society, said Ms. Kishwar, citing the example of a sarpanch, or elected village council head, in Bibipur village in Haryana, who has roped in the local khaps in the anti-feticide campaign that he has started in his village.
Another reader, APS from California, argued that according to an Indian religious leader, "increased consumption of meat and alcohol" is the reason for the rising occurrence of rape in India, but "nowhere do they note that there is a steady rise in female feticide/infanticide in India".
