SINGHPURA, India - Standing in front of his small brick home, in a courtyard where the dirt has been packed down by generations of barefoot children, the middle-aged mustard farmer doesn't bother to hide his exhaustion.

"Only someone who has been through something like this can understand the size of my catastrophe," said Sukhpal Singh Tomar. For years, he has struggled to find some reason for his suffering, but has come up with little. He shrugged: "It must be my karma."

The catastrophe? His daughters — all eight — so many he sometimes stumbles over their names. But his wife, Shanti, never forgets, and the words spill from her like a breathless prayer: "Anu-Jyoti-Poonam-Roshni-Sheetal-Bindu-Chandni-Shezal."

They have been born in a country leaping headfirst into the globalized world but still holding tight to a preference for boys, enlarging an ever-widening gender imbalance in the second most populous nation on earth.

Tomar, 50, said his wife had also had three abortions. Asked if the intent had been to abort female fetuses, he looked silently at the ground.

"It would have been easier to have a son. Even just one," said Shanti, 38, whose stringy hair and worn skin make her look 20 years older. She's holding their youngest girl, 3-month-old Shezal.

Much has changed in this village since the Tomars' first daughter was born 19 years ago. Electricity arrived, and later the first cell phones. The number of tractors has quadrupled. Today, the village's girls attend the local primary school just like its boys.

"There's more money here now, and more education. But it's still in the back of everyone's mind: 'I must have a male child,'" said Madhur Gurhan, the obstetrician who runs the public hospital's maternity ward in Morena, the largest nearby city. "The money doesn't change that."

It has long been clear that India has a deep-seated preference for boys. By 2001, researchers estimated the country had anywhere from 20 million to 40 million "missing" girls from sex-selective abortions made available through the spread of ultrasound technology.

But as India modernizes — as places like Singhpura become small towns, as towns become cities and as India's once-overwhelming poverty is slowly supplanted by an increasingly educated middle class that wants fewer children — researchers say the problem is only getting worse.

"We're now dealing with attitudes that are spreading," said Sabu George, a prominent activist against the practice. "It's frightening what we're heading to."

While the next national census will not be done until 2011, giving a detailed overall picture, study after study has found an increasingly grim situation even as India's middle class grows.

While researchers once thought education and wealth would dampen the preference for boys, the reverse has turned out to be true.

According to UNICEF, about 7,000 fewer girls than expected are born every day in India. According to the British medical journal The Lancet, up to 500,000 female fetuses are being aborted every year. This in a country where abortion is legal but sex-determination tests were outlawed in 1991 — a law nearly impossible to enforce, since ultrasound tests leave no trace.

More ......