PC & PNDT Act Consultation

Last Sunday was the consultation for the PC & PNDT Act. The Pre-Conception* and Pre-Natal Determination Techniques stand for those tests that are used to determine a child’s sex before birth – and sadly, in many parts of India, lead to the abortion of female fetuses. The legislation concerned here was meant to be used to police the use of such devices: require that any such devices be registered with a particular government agency, and to ban the use of such devices for the sole purpose of determining the sex.

This consultation, in particular, was regarding a public interest litigation case that HRLN had filed recently regarding the implementation of the Act. Although the Act was passed several years ago, implementation was lax, and enforcement was non-existent. Attending the consultation were representatives from NGOs and organizations who were working on this particular issue in their respective states, and each representative gave a report on the status of implementation in their state. Representatives were in attendance from Haryana, Punjab, Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Bihar, Orissa, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh (as well as Delhi itself).

After getting briefings from each state on the implementation of the legislation (mostly reporting that there was little enforcement, with maybe one-two convictions over the last four years), we then moved to the real goal of the consultation: formulating the exact requests that would go into the consent decree that we would present to the court in the upcoming hearing. We already had a draft put together, with requests ranging from increased infrastructure to implement the legislation, to better maintenance of records, more reporting requirements, and more transparency in the committee meetings for those who would be implementing the legislation.

It was interesting to see this discussion – some of the more interesting points:

• the language barriers. There was no common language among all the participants in the room, though English was probably the closest. Those from the North would often go between Hindi and English, but when they flowed into Hindi, someone would have to be sitting with those from the South to translate into English. When people spoke in pure English, then there would also need to be some translation for certain participants. I’ve become used to this constant language problem, to some extent, but it always amazes me to think that even being in the same country, with all relatively highly-educated people, there are still such basic communications issues. Add that to the complex topic we were discussing, and it’s kind of miraculous that anything is able to get done in a single day (not really, I supposed, but that’s often how it feels).
• the extent to which details were discussed. Consent decrees in the U.S., at least so far as my familiarity goes, are not usually incredibly detailed, in order to allow the parties the flexibility to negotiate. Also, there were a lot of things being discussed which seemed, to my mind, to stretch beyond the Court’s powers – going into the Executive’s realm of power. This was only raised once the whole day, and it was kind of a token aside, to not go too far in their requests. The attitude seems to be that different courts are willing to order different things, and so one might as well ask for as much as they want, and see how far the court will go.
• the difficulty in applying national legislation to the range of problems experienced in the states. It was clear that not only was the implementation at different levels in different states, but also that different authorities were trusted in different areas. Some states had faith in the committees that would be formed as a result of legislation implementation, and were willing to entrust them with enforcement duties, while others wanted more strict liability enforcement from the statute so that they would not have to rely on any committees.

The day ended up with a pretty complete list of demands to put before the court. The case has not come up yet, so it’ll be interesting to see what the court’s reaction is.

*If any science-y people are reading this (I know you're out there), can you please explain to me how one could possibly tell the sex of a child "pre-conception"? I mean, a child has to be conceived before any of this... right?