Two articles out on Monday provide a disturbing glimpse into how some segments of Indian society are “coping” with the ravages of sex selection. The first is from the UK based Independent:

Tripla’s parents sold her for £170 to a man who had come looking for a wife. He took her away with him, hundreds of miles across India, to the villages outside Delhi. It was the last time she would see her home. For six months, she lived with him in the village, although there was never any formal marriage. Then, two weeks ago, her husband, Ajmer Singh, ordered her to sleep with his brother, who could not find a wife. When Tripla refused, he took her into the fields and beheaded her with a sickle.

When Rishi Kant, an Indian human rights campaigner, tracked down Tripla’s parents in the state of Jharkhand and told them the news, her mother broke down in tears. “But what could we do?” she asked him. “We are facing so much poverty we had no choice but to sell her.”

Tripla was a victim of the common practice in India of aborting baby girls because parents only want boys. Although she was born and lived into early adulthood, it was the abortions that caused her death. In the villages of Haryana, just outside Delhi, abortions of baby girls have become so common that the shortage of women is severe. Unable to find wives locally, the men have resorted to buying women from the poorer parts of India. Just 25 miles from the glitzy new shopping malls and apartment complexes of Delhi is a slave market for women. [Link]

Normal laws of supply in demand would have led me to guess that when “enough” girls had been aborted, the ones that survived to birth would eventually become “more valuable” than men. I even imagined a reverse dowery situation as a possibility. Society would finally see the fallacy of its ways when men had nobody to marry. Probably like many who were as naive as me, I never accounted for the fact that a quicker way to deal with the problem was money. Just like there is a black market for kidneys there is growing black market for women.

When the police arrested Tripla’s husband, he could not provide a marriage certificate. Generally, there is no real marriage. The women are sexual “brides” only. Sometimes, brothers who cannot afford more share one woman between them. Often, men who think they have got a good deal on a particularly beautiful bride will sell her at a profit. [Link]

The second article was sent to me by former SM blogger Apul. It seems that if you are a male living in Rajasthan then your probability of finding a bride is much better if…you have a sister. The arrangement is called “aata-saata”:

Long, twirling moustaches and bejewelled daggers are no longer enough for a man seeking to marry in India’s desert state of Rajasthan, long considered a land of fearless warriors.

But if he is lucky enough to have a sister, he can relax, a newspaper report said Sunday.

A declining sex ratio in the state is prompting a girl’s parents to spurn offers of marriage from men unless the potential groom’s family also has a marriageable daughter for their son, the Sunday Express said.

“Around 30 percent of the marriages in the past year in Shekhawati region of Rajasthan were fixed on this swap system,” local lawmaker Rajendra Chauhan said. [Link]

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p>Of course, what both of these methods of dealing with the girl shortage have in common is that the girl is treated like property. Sold in the first case and bartered in the second. A man is now treated like a King if he has been blessed with the right riches:

…the absence of girls is changing village dynamics, the newspaper said.

“There are no girls. If there is one in a house, the father is like a king. He can demand anything,” said Prahland Singh, the head of Bhorki village in Rajasthan. [Link]