July 27, 2015 Bike lovers from the Teesta Thumpers Motorcycle Club set off on a rally from the eastern city of Siliguri, to raise awareness of female foeticide and to promote gender equality with a theme “Save the girl child”
The seven bikers are travelling from Siliguri in West Bengal to the Himalayan region of Ladakh in Jammu and Kashmir.
The Club’s road captain Sourav Bhattacharjee says
“It is a 27 day-long trip in which we are covering more than 3000 kilometres on our bikes. And the ride is about saving the girl child. So we are riding through the states where these things happen very regularly. We will try our best to create an awareness to save the girl child,”
People cheered and wished them well before the team set off, laden with provisions for their journey.
The only woman in the team, Priyanka Bhattacharjee, hopes her presence on the ride would help to prove their point.
“We cannot change the mentality of the people but we will try to spread the ‘save the girl child’ slogan so that we can aware people not to kill the female foetus. Because being a girl, if I can ride and if I can do all the household work, the girls can do everything. They are equal to boys so we will spread that slogan not to kill female foetus,”
India’s minister for women and child development, Maneka Gandhi, said earlier this year that two thousand girls are “killed” every day due to a preference for sons in India. Most are terminated during pregnancy or murdered just after birth.
The United Nation added even more dire information, saying that the dwindling numbers of Indian girls, caused by the illegal abortion of millions of babies, has reached “emergency proportions”, fuelling an increase in crimes such as kidnapping and trafficking.
There are laws that ban expectant parents from running tests to determine the gender of unborn children, but female foeticide continues as a common practice in parts of India.