The city has over a dozen girls’ colleges and a large number ladies’ clubs. What are they doing? Lady teachers, many of them underpaid, deliver excellent bookish lectures and believe their work is over. And the functions of these ladies’ clubs, as they appear in the press, are confined solely to garment shows, samosa-dahi-bhalla preparations and ramp walks. How many women activists does the city have to fight for their causes? At least, none to my knowledge. The local bar association must be having a women’s wing but that is not visible. If women do not fight for themselves, who else will? Once I asked an elite lady what they were doing to curb the evil of foeticide and she didn’t have anything to say.

The city also boasts of a large number of NGOs of nondescript profiles, and I happen to be a member of one. Some of them must have locked horns with our formidably adamant system but most of them arrange a lecture once in a couple of years to keep it alive in the media’s glare. One reason for this is our appallingly inhuman system.

The situation of women in the city is as menacing as elsewhere in the country because, with our medieval social set-up, we treat a woman less like a human being. We have pretty good laws to help women, but these laws are not meant for implementation. A healthy social transformation, among other instruments and aids, needs at least two essential vehicles: a vigorous and continuous awareness campaign and a more effective legal action in tandem.

Our daughters, girls, and women have committed no crime to be subjected to the atrocities they suffer from the pre-natal foeticide to post-natal malnutrition, dowry and burning, rape and murder and the trudge into the old age. There is no honour in molesting or killing girls, not the least in the name of culture and religion. It is simply diabolical.