By RAYMOND BONNER
MLA NAIK, India, June 16 — After Rukkibai, who is not sure of her age, but thinks she is 30, gave birth to her fifth daughter, a woman from a nearby village came and offered her 1,100 rupees — roughly $20 — for the girl.
Rukkibai said her husband had been opposed to selling their daughter, but she sold the girl, who was 1 month old, one day when he was in the fields.
"We are poor people, we don't have enough to eat," explained her husband, Lakshman Ratohre, who is also illiterate, and thinks he is 40 or 45. At first he was angry, but now he understands. "We don't have fields to cultivate. We have to work in order to eat."
Toiling in someone else's corn, sugar cane and vegetable fields, he earns $1 to $1.50 a day; for the same work, his wife earns about 60 cents a day.
Like nearly all villages in this region, Omla Naik is short on amenities like electricity, running water, schools or any health care, and long on poverty and illiteracy. Of the 170 families, maybe only 70 have plots of land, villagers said.
The same woman from the nearby village also bought other newborns from families here. But she was only a link in a chain. For a small amount, she said, she passed the baby to others. Eventually the girls were taken to orphanages and then adopted, almost all by Westerners.
The girls from this village and others nearby were sold in 2000. A year later, after the baby-trafficking racket was exposed, the villagers here gathered and discovered that 20 women had sold their daughters, to the same woman.
After Rukkibai and her husband sold their daughter, Rukkibai gave birth again. They did not sell this baby, however.
"He's a son," her husband said. "He'll work with me, and when we get older, he will feed us."
Yes, if it had been a girl, they would have sold her.
Jumaki Bai sold her fifth daughter — she already had two sons, and four daughters.
Asked if she would have sold her seventh child, if it had been a boy, she could not understand how anyone could ask such a foolish question.