When was the 'Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao' campaign launched for the protection and empowerment of the girl child as per the last revised statistics of child sex Ratio in India ?

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — option (3), 22 January 2015. Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao was launched on that date by the Prime Minister at Panipat in Haryana, and the choice of place was itself part of the message: Haryana had among the worst child sex ratios in the country, and the launch was deliberately staged in the region where the problem was sharpest rather than in the capital. The 'last revised statistics of child sex Ratio' the stem refers to is the 2011 Census, which recorded 918 girls per 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group — down from 945 in 1991 and 927 in 2001, a continuous fall across two decades even as overall literacy, income and the adult sex ratio improved. That divergence is what made the figure alarming: it could not be explained by poverty or by neglect alone, because it was worst in some of the richest districts, which pointed at prenatal sex determination and sex-selective elimination. The scheme was designed as a tri-ministerial effort, run jointly by the Ministry of Women and Child Development with the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the ministry responsible for school education, and it began in one hundred districts selected for their low child sex ratio. Its three declared objectives are to prevent gender-biased sex-selective elimination, to ensure the survival and protection of the girl child, and to ensure her education and participation. The date is worth fixing precisely, because three of the four printed choices differ from it by only a year or by three days.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) This gives the right day and month but the wrong year. By January 2016 the scheme was already a year old and moving into its expansion phase, with additional districts being added to the original hundred low-child-sex-ratio districts chosen at launch. The trap is built for a candidate who has memorised '22 January' as the anniversary but not fixed the year to it, and the paper offers two such year-shifted choices so that recalling only the day is not enough to answer.  (b) This is the same day and month with the year moved three years forward. 2018 is a real landmark in the scheme's history — that is the year Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao was widened from its district-selective coverage to a pan-India programme running in every district of the country — so a candidate who has read about the expansion may attach the launch date to it. But expansion is not launch: the scheme had been running for three years by then, and the question asks when it was launched.  (d) This keeps the correct year and moves the date three days later, which is the sharpest of the three traps because the last week of January is crowded with related observances: 24 January is National Girl Child Day, marked annually for precisely this cause, and 25 January is National Voters' Day. A candidate who remembers that the launch sat in that cluster of dates but not which day it fell on is exactly who this choice is written for. The launch itself was on 22 January 2015.

Concept: The child sex ratio, defined in Indian censuses as the number of girls per 1,000 boys in the 0-6 age group, is a more sensitive indicator of discrimination against girls than the overall sex ratio, because it is measured over a short and recent span of births and is not blurred by differences in adult mortality or migration. Its fall from 945 in 1991 to 927 in 2001 and 918 in 2011 coincided with the spread of ultrasound technology, and the pattern across districts made the mechanism plain: the ratio was often worst in prosperous, well-served districts, which is the signature of deliberate prenatal selection rather than of poverty. The legal response came first, in the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, which prohibits sex determination and regulates the use of diagnostic equipment; Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao was designed as the social and administrative complement to it, combining enforcement of that law with a mass communication campaign and with district-level convergence between health, education and child development staff. It carries no large cash entitlement of its own; its budget is dominated by advocacy and communication, and the outcome it is judged against is the sex ratio at birth reported by district civil registration.

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