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UK aid pays for India’s poor to be “forced, duped and drugged” into sterilisation

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Ilona Lo Iacono
WVoN co-editor 

Tens of millions of pounds in aid from the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) have been spent on a programme that has forcibly sterilised women and men in India.

Poor men and women have been “forced, duped and drugged” into the sterilisations, which are often carried out in unsafe and unhygienic conditions.

DfID said last year: “We condemn forced sterilisation and have taken steps to ensure that not a penny of UK aid could support it. The UK does not fund sterilisation centres anywhere.”

However, DfID has apparently overlooked concerns that aid money may be spent on stripping men and women of their reproductive rights and their safety: £166 million was earmarked for population control programmes in India.

Many women have died as a result of botched operations; others have suffered miscarriages, and yet more have been left bleeding and in pain without post-operative care.

Health rights activist Devika Biswas brought a Public Interest Litigation before India’s supreme court earlier this month, saying that “inhuman sterilisations, particularly in rural areas, continue with reckless disregard for the lives of poor women”.

She cited the case of a sterilisation camp in Araria district, Bihar; she was an eye-witness to one private doctor, working for an NGO, sterilizing 53 women in just two hours.

The operations took place in Kaparfora Government Middle School, without basic amenities such as running water and sterilising equipment.

The doctor, who did not wear a surgical gown or cap, and neither washed his hands nor changed his gloves, operated on the women at night, by torchlight, using school desks as operating tables. He was aided by unqualified staff, who lay the women out on paddy straw when their operations had been completed.

Biswas said that neither the NGO nor the surgeon conducted pre-operative tests to determine suitability of the women for sterilization.

“As a result of these operations, three women were left profusely bleeding. Another woman was operated, despite being three-month pregnant. She miscarried days after the procedure.

“The surgeon left immediately after operating 53 women between 8pm and 10 pm. After the surgeries, all 53 women were crying out in pain. Though they were in desperate need of medical care, no one came to assist them,” she said.

Throughout India, Biswas said, rural women are routinely dehumanised in similar camps. “Reports and fact-findings from Maharashtra, Kerala and Madhya Pradesh demonstrate that standards of hygiene, consent and care are routinely ignored in sterilisation camps.”

On April 9, 26-year-old Bala underwent sterilisation at just such a camp in Nagaur district, Rajasthan. She died, allegedly of vasovagal shock, after her emergency post-operative transfer to a community health centre.

On February 9, a 35-year-old mother of six, Rekha Wasnik, who was pregnant with twins, bled to death in Madhya Pradesh’s Balaghat district.

She had been given no pre-operative check-up and sources in the district say she died of “sheer negligence”; her post-mortem report described “external and internal bleeding” in her uterus, from injuries caused by a sharp and pointed instrument as the cause of her death.

Dr Anita Parashar, who performed the operation, told the Times of India that she made the first incision and found that Wasnik was pregnant. “So I stitched her up and told her to undergo an abortion.”

Dr Parashar said that she received a call later to inform her that the woman was feeling “unwell”.

Both men and women are routinely offered lottery tickets, electrical goods and even cars in exchange for being sterilised; often, the promised goods do not materialise.

In Madhya Pradesh, men have even been offered gun licences in exchange for vasectomies, under a scheme launched in 2008.

After a survey found that most men refused vasectomies because they did not want to lose their “manliness,” the Government decided to offer a gun licence as a “bigger symbol of manliness”.

In 2012, poor Indians are still sometimes forced to accept sterilisation in return for medicine or vaccines, either for themselves (in the case of a 16-year-old boy with a fever), or for their children. Some have even been threatened with the loss of their state food rations if they do not agree to the procedure.

Still others have woken, confused, after being drugged and operated on, perhaps with a little money in their pocket as compensation.

NGOs and officials continue to meet their quotas by any means possible, whether to stave off penalties or to earn bonuses for themselves.

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