The local health worker who lives in this village, a kindly woman named Jaswinder Kaur, recently led the way through a maze of narrow lanes to the home of one such family. Now her belly has swelled again, this time with the longed-for male child. Her plump face seemed radiant with well-being.
Boys are important because they have to look after all the property.
Early figures from the 2001 census, conducted in February and March, have made it clear that female fetuses are being regularly aborted, continuing a trend that first became marked in the 1980's. The number of girls per 1,000 boys dropped to 927 this year from 945 in 1991 and 962 in 1981. The fall in the ratio of girls to boys over the past decade, when India's population grew by a staggering 181 million, has been most extreme in the richest states of the north and west, where more people can afford tests and abortions, demographers and economists say. For example, here in Punjab, India's most prosperous farming state, the ratio of girls to boys has plummeted to 793 girls per 1,000 boys from 875, while in Gujarat, a leading industrial state, the figure for girls has fallen to 878 from 928. A pronounced gender imbalance has long been a feature of life in India, especially in the north.