A magistrate’s court at Parli in Beed district of Maharashtra on Monday sentenced two doctors — Dr. Sudam Munde and his wife Dr. Saraswati — to six years imprisonment for conducting illegal sex determination tests. They also have to pay a fine of Rs. 80,000 each.
The activities of the Mundes were first brought to light when an organisation called Lek Ladaki Abhiyan carried out a sting operation in 2010 at the clinic and took the doctors to court. “We used a pregnant woman as a decoy and caught them red-handed for illegally practising sex determination tests at their clinic. They used to feed the aborted foetuses to the dogs. This is the first case where a conviction has taken place after an expose through a sting operation in illegal sex determination cases,” Varsha Deshpande from the organisation told The Hindu .
The doctor couple has two more cases against them in court, one pertaining to Medical Termination of Pregnancy (MTP), in which 11 foetuses were found in a garbage dump and another of murder in which a patient allegedly died during abortion, Ms. Deshpande said.
Following the sting operation, the State cracked down on maternity clinics and centres using sonography machines. Beed district, located in the Marathwada region, has the lowest child sex ratio in the State of 801 girls to 1,000 boys, as per the 2011 Census.
