Don’t really know what to say about this.  Very disturbing that such an intervention is even needed…

They are India’s “Cradle Babies” – products of a government project that permits parents to give unwanted baby girls anonymously to the state, saving them from possible death in a region where daughters are seen as a burden and where their murder is a common reality.

“Often babies are found in ditches and garbage pits. Some are alive, others are dead,” said A. Devaki, a government child protection officer in the Salem district, one of the worst-afflicted areas.

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But while the project has been praised for potentially saving the lives of thousands of Indian girls, human rights activists have criticised it, accusing authorities of encouraging the abandonment of girls and promoting the low status of women in this largely patriarchal society.

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Started in 1992, the project runs in dusty towns and mud-and-brick villages across Tamil Nadu. It allows parents to leave unwanted baby girls in dozens of empty cradles in hospitals, welfare centres and government offices

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Since the Cradle Baby programme began, poverty-stricken parents and single mothers have handed-in over 3,700 children, mostly girls. More than 3,600 of them have been adopted by childless, middle-class couples in Tamil Nadu, officials said.

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Activists and officials say financial pressures associated with dowries are so great that parents have been aborting female foetuses for decades after discovering their gender through ultrasound examinations, despite the practice being illegal.

A 2011 study in The Lancet medical journal found up to 12 million Indian girls had been aborted in the past three decades.

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Other parents kill girls or fail to save them from preventable diseases, leading to alarmingly skewed child gender ratios. There were 919 girls to every 1,000 boys in 2011 compared with 976 in 1961, says the Census of India.

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Officials say the Cradle Baby programme has been a success, improving gender ratios where the project is active.

Rights activists say the improved ratio is largely a result of greater awareness and advocacy work, and better family planning, rather than because of the project.

They say the programme has failed to tackle the root causes of female infanticide by promoting the abandonment of girls and allowing parents to shift responsibility to the state. As a result, they say, killing of baby girls continues.