Thursday 4th December 2008

The Foreign Correspondents' Club is a playground for Delhi's displaced journalists. It has everything a hack could need after an isolated day in a lonely office: cheap alcohol, smoking indoors, and the requisite ping-pong table. It looks very much like an Oxbridge college bar. A flushed landlady stands behind a ramshackle table pouring bottom-shelf spirits to thirsty punters, random maps and black and white photos hang on the wall, and the toilet looks like it might have seen more than one vomiting episode in its time. Not to mention the waft of accents that might have stepped straight off the rugby field, or the polo ground; voices that by day narrate radio programmes and present live-stream television bulletins.

Here, the stories behind the stories are swapped: the interviewee who was a complete bastard but had to be polished into a hero for the sake of newsroom politics; the bus that broke down on the way to some far-out refugee camp and lost them the story; the budget cuts that mean there are no more long lunches on fiddled expenses.

Tonight, over red wine and paneer pakoras, a man announces himself and joins us at our table, in the way only long-term expats know. He's Johann, a German banker, who has joined his Swedish correspondent wife to live in India. She's down in Kerala, writing a story on the cashew growers there, and has left him to his own devices in Delhi. We talk about the usual issues: the Delhi winter that is creeping in, leaving our bones chilled at night under layered blankets; the sluggish government; rude rickshaw drivers and the rate of the rupee against the Euro and the Dollar. Then suddenly, unexpectedly, he announces that he is having a baby.

His wife, that is. We are shocked. In India? Is she not afraid? We imagine her labouring in some dirty ramshackle hospital, crying for an epidural that never comes, yanked with dirty clamps and scalpels. He laughs, and explains that the private hospital she is booked into is cleaner than most you would find in Europe.

It seemed ironic, however, that she should choose to come from the country with the lowest maternal mortality rates in the world, to a country with one of the highest. And to choose India over Sweden - a country with one of the most generous laws concerning maternal leave and government grants - and instead give birth in a land where these concepts are virtually alien.

One woman dies in childbirth every five minutes in India. The maternal mortality rate is 540 in every 100,000. Compare this to 11 in the US, or 2 in Sweden. Most deaths are caused by bleeding, infection caused by unclean hospitals and equipment, or high blood pressure and anaemia which go undetected and untreated. Most women who die in childbirth, according to UNICEF, remain invisible. Many die in their homes - where the majority of births are still carried out - without trained midwives.

Johann has no idea whether his child is a boy or a girl, and it's not a choice. In Inida, most clinics prohibit expectant parents from being told the birth of their child - even white parents.

I think back to a conversation I'd had in Mamallapuram with the owner of the (optimistically-named) hotel we'd been staying in. Having tried for over 24 hours to get a towel, or indeed a bedsheet that wasn't stained with something ominously brown, we found out that the maitre d' had been running around trying to get his wife to the hospital.

"She is dropping the babies soon," he said, seemingly unruffled. "I will be back tomorrow morning when she has dropped." I said he must be excited. Was he worried? He just shrugged. The next day, when he appeared, I had decided to forgive him for the lack of towels, and instead attempt to shake dry in future. The poor man was having a baby, after all.

What was it? I asked excitedly. "Twins," he said. I squealed. Congratulations! What were they? He looked down, and frowned. "Girls," he growled. He seemed irritated that he had wasted an afternoon off work.

In the South, posters on walls and on the side of buses proclaim, "Save the girl child." A small childish scribble of a little girl's face accompanies the slogan. Despite being illegal, sex-selection is performed all the time, whether before conception, or after in the form of abortion. Otherwise baby girls are killed, often poisoned with the sap of the Oleander plant. Families fear paying dowries, or otherwise having to support a female child who will never be a breadwinner, or nurse her parents into old age having been absorbed into her future husband's household.

The problem is so endemic that the country's population sex ratio has been seriously skewed. Where populations in the rest of the world are typically female-heavy, India has 927 girls for every 1,000 boys. In some regions there are around 800. Many men cannot find brides because of the female shortage.

Those who do have children in India can expect few special rights. Compare this to Sweden, where parents can take 16 months of parental leave at 80% pay, and can share it between the mother and father. In India, mothers can legally take 12 weeks fully paid, but it's rarely practised, and in any case, most do not have any formal employment structure, working in fields or labouring for cash in hand. A great many work on subsistence only, which they cannot afford to give up with a baby to nurse.

Of course, despite missing out on Sweden's perks, Johann can expect his child to be born with few glitches - whether a boy or a girl - with mother and child doing well. Perhaps in a few months he'll come back to the Foreign Correspondent's Club to toast their health.