Villagers in India have rescued a newborn baby girl who was found buried alive.
The
girl, thought to be no more than six hours old, was left to die in a
shallow sand pit in a field when a young child spotted her feet poking
through the ground on Saturday.
The baby, found in Jajpur district in Odisha state, was rushed to hospital where she remains under observation, officials said.
The
area where she was discovered is one of many impoverished states where
families hope for sons and go to any lengths possible to avoid having to
raise a daughter.
Chief medical officer
Jajpur district Fanindra Kumar Panigrahi told AFP: 'She is doing fine
and all her parameters are normal. She is a full term baby, weighing
around 2.5 kg.
'Her umbilical cord was intact and body was still covered with vernix.'
A
witness who helped with the rescue, Alok Rout, said: 'It was a little
kid who first saw the feet of the child buried under a compost dump in a
field.
'Later we rushed to the spot and rescued the newborn girl.'
He said a group helped rescue the girl who was found with her face covered with a piece of cloth.
Hospital staff have named the girl Dharitri, a Sanskrit word meaning 'the earth'.
The girl will be handed over to the state-run child welfare committee after she is discharged from the Dharmasala hospital.
Police
told AFP they suspect the newborn was either abandoned by her parents
because of her gender or the mother had been an unmarried woman.
Local
police officer Jyoti Prakash Panda said: 'We are trying to track the
parents of the girl. Chances are it was a case of female feticide and it
is clear that the accused wanted to kill her.'
Police
Inspector Amitabh Mohapatra added: 'A case has been lodged against the
unidentified parents of the child and family members. An investigation
is on to find out where the child was born and under which circumstances
it was buried.'
The tiny child, aged just six hours old, was found by villagers having been buried alive
The girl, who was found with her face covered with a piece of cloth, was rescued
India
is struggling to bridge the sex ratio gap with tough laws as the
country fares badly with 940 females for every 1,000 males, according to
the last official census in 2011.
Earlier
this month police recovered 19 female fetuses from a sewer in western
Maharashtra state and accused a doctor of illegally aborting them for
parents desperate for a boy.
On Monday a female fetus was found buried near a sewer in New Delhi after dogs were spotted digging the earth around it.
India
banned prenatal sex determination to stop its misuse, although the
tests are still thought to be common, particularly in poor rural areas.
A
2011 study in the British medical journal The Lancet found that up to
12 million girls had been aborted in the last three decades in India.
Hospital staff have named the girl Dharitri, a Sanskrit word meaning 'the earth'
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