In India:
• 240,000 girls under the age of five die every year because of discrimination, through getting less food, medical treatment and care than boys.
• More than 3.7 million girls don’t go to school.
• With over 200 million women who can’t read, India has the highest number of illiterate girls and women in the world.
• Every five minutes, a case of domestic abuse is reported to the police.
• 92 girls and women are raped every day (2014).
• 11-16 million female foetuses may have been aborted between 1990 and 2018.

Girls left in the rubbish

“We realised that the situation for girls in India was far more serious than we first thought, and that discrimination against girls started as early as in their mother’s womb. If parents found out during a scan that they were expecting a girl, many chose to have an abortion. And across India, female foetuses could be found dumped at rubbish tips, having been killed at birth,” says Ashok, sadly. He became an important voice in the movement that was responsible for the introduction of a law banning abortion on the grounds of gender, which came into force in India in 1994.

12 million child brides

• Every year, 12 million girls around the world are forced to marry before they have reached the age of 18. That’s 23 girls every minute, or almost one girl every two seconds.
• 1 in 5 girls in the world are married off before the age of 18.
• Every day, 15,600 girls are married off in India, at an average age of 15, despite the fact that child marriage is illegal.
• India has the most child brides in the entire world.
• The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child prohibits child marriage, but 93 countries in the world allow girls to be married off before they reach the age of 18.
• One of the UN’s goals for 2030 is to put an end to child marriage.
• If we fail to reduce the number of child brides, an estimated 1.2 billion girls in the world will be child brides by 2050.