BBC film documents campaign against female infanticide in Bihar

London: An Indian journalist’s videos capturing the scourge of female infanticide in his home state of Bihar and a grassroots campaign to fight against the practice form the basis of a new documentary released by the BBC this week.

Amitabh Parashar’s The Midwife’s Confession, from BBC World Service and set to air on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s (BBC) News channel over two parts starting Saturday, is made up of never-before-seen footage of midwives who assisted home births in and around Katihar over the years. Their testimonies are the starting point for the film to explore the troubling history of infanticide and how social worker Anila Kumari's campaign to work with the same midwives helped turn the tide.

“What’s the real reason for the killings,” Parashar asks one of the midwives called Siro Devi – the only one of the women who is still alive and working as a village midwife over the course of his nearly 30-year filming project.

“The real reason is dowry. There is no other reason. Boys are considered higher, and girls are considered lower,” Siro Devi tells Parashar.

The documentary was shot, produced, and directed over the past two years by a team of journalists and filmmakers for BBC Eye Investigations, a global documentary strand from the BBC World Service. The midwives can be seen telling Parashar, on camera, how they did not want to kill but the girls’ own families would force them to murder the children, offering them money or even threatening them with violence if they refused.

In the 1990s, when Anila Kumari came to know about these killings, she designed an awareness programme to persuade the same midwives to bring the babies to her instead of killing them.

“Anila’s effort marked a turning point for the midwives featured in this film. With her encouragement, a small group of them, including Siro Devi, rescued at least five newborn baby girls whose families wanted them to be killed or had already abandoned them. One child died, but the other four were sent to an NGO in Patna, Bihar’s capital, and put up for adoption,” notes a BBC World Service statement on the documentary.

“With remarkable tenacity, Amitabh tracks down a young woman who, in all probability, is one of the four surviving babies rescued by the midwives in the late 1990s. Monica Thatte was adopted from an orphanage in Pune at the age of three, and the film follows her journey back to Bihar to meet with Siro and with Anila, whose campaign almost certainly saved her life,” it adds.

The documentary’s second and concluding part will be aired in the UK on September 21.