This region in Madhya Pradesh has a child sex ratio that's the third worst in Madhya Pradesh, but this bastion of the Scindia family is now waking up to the issue of female foeticide.

The latest government statistics show Shivpuri has only 858 women for every 1000 men. Yet, the government might just be winning the war against female foeticide here, thanks to a sustained crackdown on the illegal use of ultrasound machines to determine the sex of a foetus.

Mamta says despite a crackdown on pre-natal sex determination, it's still easy to get an abortion.

In sweeping raids, the district authorities have suspended the licenses of four clinics with ultrasound machines for their misuse. None of them, says the medical officer, were following even the basic procedures to operate such machines as required by the government Act.

For instance, patients need to fill up specific forms stating why they needed to use the machine so that the government can keep a check of the machines are being misused to abort fetuses. One clinic, for instance, carried out 70-odd abortions since April.

"There may have been some human error. Of the 100 forms we fill, some details may have been missing because not all people are educated to be able to fill in the details," says Dr Bhagwat Bansal, the superintendent of the clinic.

But the district collector says these clinics were being lax about maintaining records because they had things to hide.

"It's a case of being carefully careless. These doctors are connected to rich and powerful lobbies and they didn't actually worry that anything could happen to them," claims M Geeta, the district collector.

In Shivpuri, it is not hard to know where to determine the sex of the foetus and if it's a girl, where to get it aborted.

"I know someone who just went to Kalpana Clinic to get it checked and got her baby aborted because her sister in-law already had some girl children," says Mamata, a Shivpuri resident.

With the status of the girl child being so low in families, it's no wonder that the tiny abandoned children at the orphanages here are mostly girls.

"When people can't abort babies, they abandon them and that's why most of the children here are girls. If boys were born even out of rape, they wouldn't be abandoned," says Shaila Agrawal, secretary of Mahila Balashraya.