Rekha is mother of a chubby three-year-old girl.
Last September, when she became pregnant again, her
mother-in-law forced her to undergo an abortion after an ultrasound
showed that she was pregnant with twin girls. "I said there's no difference between girls and boys. But here they think differently. There's no happiness when a girl is born. They say the son will carry forward our lineage, but the daughter will get married and go off to another family."
Kulwant and Rekha live in Sagarpur, a lower middle-class area in south-west Delhi.
Here, narrow minds live in homes separated by narrow lanes.
The women's story is common and repeated in millions of homes across India, and it has been getting worse.
In 1961, for every 1,000 boys under the age of seven, there were 976 girls. Today, the figure has dropped to a dismal 914 girls.
Although the number of women overall is improving (due to factors such as life expectancy), India's ratio of young girls to boys is one of the worst in the world after China.
Many factors come into play to explain this: infanticide, abuse and neglect of girl children.
But campaigners say the decline is largely due to the increased availability of antenatal sex screening, and they talk of a genocide.
