Desperate for a male child, Jaipur mom kills baby girl

The Jaipur police has solved the mysterious death of a girl child and, as suspected, it turned out to be a case of female infanticide. The four-month-old girl was killed by her mother, who confessed to the crime after 13 days. She used a sharp object to kill the girl who had 16 injury marks on her body.

The police have arrested 35-year-old Neha Goyal for the murder of the four-month-old infant who was found with the throat slit in an air conditioner box on the second floor of a three-storey building at Subash Nagar. After allegedly killing her daughter, the culprit had raised an alarm stating that the girl was missing.

“After the murder on August 26, preliminary investigations showed that nobody had tried to trespass into the house. Since it was a family with 35 members living together, we suspected that someone from within the house could be behind the act,” Anshuman Bhomia, deputy commissioner of police (north) said.

The police got suspicious after FSL report confirmed that blood found on Neha’s nails matched with the girl. The police also took the cyber cell’s help to check the mother’s phone records that revealed that she used to search for techniques and medicines for having a baby boy but after killing her daughter she had deleted the search history.

The accused reportedly told the police that she wanted a boy for which the couple had tried varying things, from IV therapy to surrogacy. Last year, she also performed a yajna to have a baby boy. The girl she killed was her fourth child. She has an eight-year-old girl while two children had died during pregnancy.

Ironically, Neha Goyal is well educated and hails from an affluent family. She did her BA in English honours from Hansraj College, Delhi. Her husband is a businessman while his uncle is president of Traders Association of Jaipur. The police, however, claimed her husband was not part of the crime.

Rajasthan is notorious for killing its daughters. As per census 2011, child sex ratio (CSR) fell to sub 900 levels in Rajasthan. It was 909 in 2001 census but a decade later came down to 888. Out of 33 districts in the state, barely 10 districts had a CSR of 900 or above.