Taking an idea from Kolhapur district in Maharashtra, the Pali district in Rajasthan is going to install ultra sound tracking technology device called ‘silent observer’ (SIOB) at all the sonography centres in the district to control sex selection and female feticide.
Maharashtra government’s pilot project was implemented in Kolhapur district three years ago, ‘To Save the Girl Child’. Rajasthan Govt. is planning to replicate the same after witnessing an alarming rate of decline in the sex ratio in various districts.
The district administration will start installing the device from May 18 at all the 35 sonography centres operational in the district. It’s a small device, which would be attached to sonography machines. It captures the sonography image. It records personal data of the patient including the images. The server at collectorate would enable the officials to monitor all the sonography tests being conducted in the city.
The district administration will make use of the data collected at the server to verify that whether a particular pregnant woman, who underwent sonography on such a date, delivered a baby or not or she has aborted the child. The process will help the Pali district administration to save the girl fetus from being aborted.
As per Census 2011, the district witnessed a decline of 30 girl child (0-6 age group) per 1,000 boys compared to the figures in Census 2001. In Rajasthan, the drop of sex ratio is 26 points from 909 to 883 between 2001 and 2011.
Pali district collector Neeraj K Pawan said, “The sex ratio has declined in the district in the last decade. We decided to install the devices three months ago but for certain reasons we could not do so. Now, we are starting it from May 18.”
Pawan added, “We contacted the company which installed the ‘silent observer’ in Kolhapur and handed over the work to the same company here. We have also analyzed how the ‘silent observer’ is working there in Kolhapur and after that we decided to go for it as it is very necessary to keep an eye on the sonography centres who are involved in sex selection. It will cost around Rs10 lakh, which will be contributed by sonography centres and raised by charity.”
The manufacturer of this device, Magnum Opus, is a Pune-based firm, which pioneered “Save The Girl Child” initiative in collaboration with the Kolhapur district administration in Maharashtra three years ago.
After the success of Kolhapur districts, around six districts in Maharashtra, one in Gujarat and three in Haryana have started similar projects to implement the PCPNDT Act and curb female foeticide.
What is an Active Tracker? — It’s a ‘tamper-proof’ device that will be attached to each of the ultrasound machines, it gets switched on every time the ultrasound machine is switched on, It will record all the videos taken by the machine on a real-time basis and It has a memory of 1 terabyte to store all the videos.
It is enabled with GPRS that allows the control room to generate a data log for the number of hours the tracker was switched on as well as the number of videos saved in it. Both the data help the authorities in immediately tracing any tampering attempts.
