Sirsa, November 26
A young doctor in the Primary Health Centre at Ding in Sirsa was surprised when in half an hour he examined six women having the names unheard of in this area. What surprised him even more was the fact that they spoke in a language that was a mix of local dialect and the one spoken in the eastern states of the country.

When he tried to inquire from a member of the hospital staff, he asked mockingly, “Are you asking about the ‘Molkis’ doctor saab?”

When he probed further, he came to know that there were hundreds of women in Ding and the neighbouring villages of Sirsa and Fatehabad, who have been procured for money for marrying to local men who find it hard to get brides from Haryana due to a highly skewed sex ratio.

Among themselves, these women may address each other by the name their parents had given to them; others in the village called them “Molki”, which literally means purchased for money.

A survey conducted by the Women and Child Development Department in Sirsa revealed that during the year 2010 to 2011 (from January to December), out of 6,354 marriages held in the rural areas, brides were brought from outside Haryana in as many as 3,036 cases.

While many of these brides are from the neighbouring states of Punjab and Rajasthan, where villagers from this border district have relationships, the number of brides purchased from Orissa, Assam and other eastern states too is very high.

“This is because of the dwindling sex ratio in our society that our youths are unable to find brides from their own state now,” said Krishan Swaroop Gorakhpuria, a social activist.

The number of bachelors, past their marriageable age, has been on the rise in almost all parts of the state.

Jat youths, particularly those having small landholdings, are being forced into bachelorhood due the paucity of brides.

Recently, when Phillippe Tretiack, a French journalist working for Elle, an international fashion magazine, came to India in search of inputs for his story on foeticide, he chose Haryana as a destination. Village after village Phillippe visited, men between 25-45 age group, all bachelors, were busy playing card game.

He calls them a syndicate of bachelors, who ask him laughingly, “Can you get us women from Vietnam, Russia or from anywhere else?”

He explains that in a society where a family looks upon the first daughter as a scourge, second as a tragedy and third as a ruin, taking recourse to the misplaced doctors, whom he describes as “conductors of premeditated massacre”, is easily explainable.