COLUMN ONE : The Fight to Save India’s Baby Girls : Much-heralded aid programs can’t stop some rural families from killing their daughters. Poverty and stubborn tradition outweigh prosecution threats, promises of money for dowries and college.

Lakshmi already had one daughter, so when she gave birth to a second girl, she killed her.

For the three days of her second child’s short life, Lakshmi admits, she refused to nurse her. To silence the infant’s famished cries, the impoverished village woman squeezed the milky sap from an oleander shrub, mixed it with castor oil and forced the poisonous potion down the newborn’s throat.

The baby bled from the nose and died soon afterward. Female neighbors buried her in a small hole near Lakshmi’s square thatched hut of sunbaked mud.

They sympathized with Lakshmi, and in the same circumstances, some would probably have done what she did. For despite the risk of execution by hanging and about 16 months of a much-ballyhooed government scheme to assist families with daughters, in some hamlets of the south Indian state of Tamil Nadu, murdering girls is still sometimes believed to be a wiser course than raising them.

“A daughter is always liabilities. How can I bring up a second?” Lakshmi, 28, answered firmly when asked by a visitor how she could have taken her own child’s life eight years ago. “Instead of her suffering the way I do, I thought it was better to get rid of her.”

The roots of the stubbornly persistent institution of female infanticide in this hardscrabble rice and sugar cane country are numerous and deep: pervasive and grinding poverty, an age-old bias against women, the traditions of some Hindu sub-castes.

“It’s a centuries-old practice--women are perceived as a net loss to family wealth,” said Krishnaswami Rajivan, chief government official in the district center of Madurai and himself the father of a daughter. “Women take away dowry and don’t bring in a bride price. To the father of a child, a girl is net outflow.”

To stanch that loss, some Tamil villagers, often the mother’s mother-in-law, will kill a newborn if it turns out to be a girl.

Their act is extreme, but these mostly impoverished people are far from being the only Indians who do not want daughters. More affluent residents of Bombay and other cities simply resort to a more clinical procedure--the abortion of a fetus if an ultrasound test shows it to be female.

Just in Jaipur, capital of the western state of Rajasthan, prenatal sex determination tests result in an estimated 3,500 abortions of female fetuses annually, one recent medical college study showed.

Spending money to raise a daughter, traditional Indian logic holds, is as wasteful as watering your neighbor’s garden. Consequently, surveys show girls are fed less than boys and given less medical care.

Not surprising, then, that India is becoming decidedly more male: From 972 females for every 1,000 males in 1901, the most recent census showed the gender imbalance has tilted to 929 females per 1,000 males.

In the nearly 300 backward hamlets of the Usilampatti area of Tamil Nadu, as many as 196 girls died under suspicious circumstances last year. Some were fed dry, unhulled rice that punctured their windpipes, or were made to swallow poisonous powdered fertilizer. Others were smothered with a wet towel, strangled or allowed to starve to death.

“Killing isn’t a big sin up there,” said Francis Xavier Amalraj, head of the Usilampatti office of the quasi-governmental Indian Council for Child Welfare.

Gesturing in the direction of the ramshackle adobe villages inhabited by Lakshmi and other members of the Kallar sub-caste, Amalraj added, “Twenty years ago, they used to take pride in saying, ‘I killed my baby.’ ”

Amalraj said he could recall only one instance, about six months ago, in which the victim was a boy.

Families who selectively kill their daughters face legal risks that usually mean nothing in reality. In Madras, Tamil Nadu’s capital, top social welfare officials know of only 11 prosecutions for infant murder in the first 12 months of a state program against female infanticide launched in October, 1992. In theory, a conviction could mean life imprisonment or even the death penalty.

Many births take place in isolated villages, with only female friends and the midwife present. If a child dies, the women can always blame natural causes.

“It’s easier for me to tell you about investigating these cases than for the police to do it,” Rajivan said from behind his file-cluttered desk. “A policeman simply can’t be there to check that every baby has survived birth.”

Other infants are abandoned and become wards of the state until adoptive families can be found. On the second floor of an infant shelter in Usilampatti, five babies without names dozed one recent afternoon on straw mats or in cradles made of welded pipe. All were girls; one, born a month premature, was abandoned the day of her birth.

Tamil Nadu was slow to react to female infanticide even though it is India’s only state headed by a woman. But its program against the practice, now 16 months old, seeks to make it worth a family’s financial while to keep the child.

Simultaneously, foreign-funded charities offer incentives for parents to keep their daughters.

Results are mixed. Recent statistics from Usilampatti indicate that the killings continue. But in Tamil Nadu’s Salem district, the other locale notorious for the practice, Public Health Department surveys show a sharp decline in the death of babies from “social causes,” the euphemism for female infanticide.

In 1992-93, there were 1,600 deaths in the Salem district; for the nine months ending last September, there were 222, said Kannayiram Dheenadhayalan, the state’s director of social welfare.

“In another couple of years, we hope to have eradicated this menace,” Dheenadhayalan said.

In Salem, more affluent than Usilampatti and where another Hindu sub-caste, the more advanced landowning clan named the Gounders, is prevalent, the government has placed cradles in primary health care clinics, hospitals and other institutions to offer wavering mothers a choice: They can abandon their baby and know it will be cared for.

The leaders of Tamil Nadu are also holding out a tempting carrot to couples in the state with one or two daughters and no sons: If one parent undergoes sterilization, the government will give the family $160 in aid per child. The money will be paid in installments as the girl goes through school.

She will also get a small gold ring and, on her 20th birthday, a lump sum of $650 to serve as her dowry or defray the expenses of higher education.

Four thousand families enrolled in the first year, Dheenadhayalan said. This year, he expects 6,000 to 8,000 more to join.

The bespectacled member of the elite Indian Administrative Service exudes confidence that infanticide is being stamped out. But a visit to the villages east of Usilampatti, sprinkled among rice paddies and sugar cane breaks and linked by dirt roads plied by bullock cart, shows Dheenadhayalan’s forecasts are too rosy.

Historically, this backward corner of Tamil Nadu has not been a good place to be born a girl: In a recent three-year period, 500 female newborns were killed in Jothimanickam and 15 nearby villages alone, one survey showed.

Families of the Kallar sub-caste customarily have kept the first daughter and disposed of girls born subsequently. Life for people here is hard. Caste members once lived off soldiering and cattle-rustling but now mostly eke out a living as landless farmhands. Lakshmi, for instance, cuts sugar cane or does other field chores when she can find work.

Survival can be a matter of cruel arithmetic. If enough monsoon rain doesn’t fall on the flatlands that are lushly green now but turn parched in summer, a family can go hungry or be without work. Each new mouth increases the odds.

For five years, World Vision, a Monrovia-based international Christian humanitarian charity, has worked with the villagers. In the most recent reporting period, from October, 1992, to October, 1993, its workers helped ensure that of 28 girls born in Jothimanickam and neighboring hamlets, 22 are still alive.

“Before World Vision arrived, a second daughter would never be born into a family--she would be killed,” said S. Titus Kadappaichamy, who heads World Vision’s 24-member field office and health center. “We have saved so far 38 girl children.”

One is Lakshmi’s. After counseling and pledges of help from World Vision’s $45,000 annual budget, the gaunt young woman decided when she became pregnant a third time that she would keep the child, regardless of gender. Three years ago, she gave birth to Dibarani.

Her husband was furious. “Don’t you know how to have anything but female children?” he shouted. Lakshmi stood her ground.

Indirani Karthakannan, a former second-grade teacher, helped make the difference. One of three health workers employed by World Vision, she told Lakshmi that it was wrong to kill her child, escorted her to the clinic for prenatal examinations, noted her medical condition and state of mind in roundish Tamil script inside a folder she carries and, in general, kept an eye on her the way she watches other expectant mothers.

“I tell parents, don’t think if you have a boy, that means he’ll be helpful at home,” said Indirani, 27, summing up what she tells families. “Don’t think where there are only boys that it’s a happy family.”

Indirani, a small-boned woman who wears a bright blue sari and gold bracelets, beams when quizzed about her impact. She believes she has saved 30 girls, she says. Ten others have been murdered. She knows of the deaths, but won’t say anything outside the tight little world of village society. If she did, she said, the trust that villagers now put in her would be shattered.

“My intention isn’t to go against the law, but if I go to the police about one child, I won’t be in a position to help any woman,” Indirani explained.

Other social workers do tell. A mother who already had two daughters gave birth to a healthy 7-pound 11-ounce girl last month, then disappeared from the government hospital in Usilampatti with her newborn the next day. When Rajaratnam Jayanthi of the Indian Council on Child Welfare went to her home to give the mother a nutrition chart, the woman couldn’t explain where her baby was.

A police investigation prompted by Jayanthi’s complaint turned up the body, which had been buried in front of the house. An autopsy showed the 1-day-old child’s neck had been compressed and the bones broken into pieces. The parents were arrested for murder under Section 302 of the Indian Penal Code, a rare occurrence. (The case has not yet been resolved.)

One recent day, Lakshmi, Indirani and a dozen other village women walked to the World Vision office and clinic beneath the palm trees in Jothimanickam to tell their stories through a translator. It was a sobering experience. Tamil Nadu’s plan for aid to families with daughters, officially known as Government Order No. 533, may exist on paper, but not a single village woman appeared to know about it. The document seemed to have no more bearing on their lives than the latest theoretical treatise on molecular biology.

(Likewise, interviews with officials in Madras showed they were often out of touch with what was happening in the villages).

The women talked emotionally about the dowry tradition, and how it made having daughters so much more onerous for the poor.

“If I approach a family about a possible son-in-law, they will start asking for things. And where will I get such things?” asked a toothless woman named Paunthai, who has both a son and a daughter.

As the women, barefoot and seated on mats, continued to talk, then began to shout excitedly, it became clear that Paunthai personified why parents prefer sons. Paunthai zestily joined in the general criticism of paying dowries, but she became evasive when asked if she would not seek one when time came to marry off her 19-year-old son.

“You will demand 400 grams in (gold) sovereigns (about $5,300)!” women seated around her shouted.

Lakshmi’s younger daughter is now 3. Through the World Vision program aimed at eliminating the economics roots of female infanticide, Lakshmi has been given $100 to buy a cow to help feed her expanded family. She has also been promised a dowry worth $500 when Dibarani reaches marrying age.

Lakshmi smiles, showing white and uneven teeth, as she affectionately cradles her little girl in her arms and chucks her under the chin. She has no remorse for what she did to Dibarani’s older sister. The facts of life in Usilampatti meant she had to die.

“It was not a happy thing to do,” Lakshmi said. “At times I think about it. But at the time, there was nothing else to do.”