Women undergo 98 per cent of sterilizations in India

The botched sterilization of women in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh has once again highlighted the murky world of such mass sterilizations in India. Last year, about 4.2 million sterilizations took place in the country.

But the striking fact is that almost 98% of these were tubectomies, that is, female sterilizations. Almost 37% of all tubectomies in the world are done in India. In fact, India is the only country in the world where female sterilization predominates among various birth control measures.
This will explain why it is women who are the victims of the Bilaspur tragedy. According to reports, a surgeon conducted tubectomies on 83 women in quick succession. The women went into toxic shock, which might be because of instruments not being sterile.

Although laparoscopic sterilization is now the technique of choice because it enables quick recovery and least invasion, ironically, it could also be the cause of the present tragedy, according to Dr T Sundaraman, former executive director of the National Health Systems Resource Centre run by the Union health ministry.

"Laparoscopic surgery requires a higher degree of skill and also a more complicated method of sterilizing the equipment. Using inadequately sterilized instruments will lead to infections," he told TOI from Raipur.

Sundaraman blames the increasing deficiency of health personnel in government health centres for recurring incidents of this kind. While deaths due to sterilization procedures have ranged from 153 to 184 a year between 2010 and 2012, cases of post-operative complications have more than doubled in the past four years.

The larger truth hidden in the government's sterilization efforts is that it is almost exclusively directed at women. This is because men are under the misapprehension that sterilization will affect their 'manliness' or virility. So, women are encouraged to get themselves sterilized.