Tamil Nadu's Cradle Baby Scheme - How One Policy Saved Thousands of Girls

Abstract

Female infanticide is one of the most organized oppressed pinnacles of gender-based violence in the contemporary history. Over 6,000 newborn girls were killed in Salem district in Tamil Nadu, India, over two years in the late 1980s, a number that by far underestimates the scale of the crisis due to the domestic and informal character of such murders. In 1992, Chief Minister J. Jayalalithaa launched the Cradle Baby Scheme, which was an intervention of modest structure, free of stigma, allowing parents to leave unwanted newborn girls without marking her death at specified public places. The state became the legal parent of all surrendered children. This paper will discuss the socioeconomic origins of son preference in Tamil Nadu, the mechanical structure and geographic proliferation of the scheme, and its quantifiable demographic consequences. The child sex ratio in Tamil Nadu rose by 927 in the pre-scheme period to 943 by the 2011 census and a 2019 National Family Health Survey reported an almost even ratio of 995 girls per 1000 boys. Based on this experience, the article concludes a generalizable governance-based social change model, claiming that structural behavioral interventions are always more effective than attitude-change efforts when dealing with deeply rooted cultural behaviors. The Tamil Nadu case has important lessons of replication to the policymakers, the administrators of the Indian public health, and the leaders of civil society in settings where embedded social behavior is difficult to change through the usual reform.