As per the order of the Supreme Court, search engines such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft's Bing have been asked to cease the showcasing of advertisements related to sex determination tests.
The Supreme Court passed the orders, keeping in mind the decreasing population of girls in India. According to an NDTV report, the order passed by the Supreme Court was on the basis of a Public Interest Litigation (PIL), which mentions that sex determination during pregnancy as illegal.
Though selective abortion has been banned in India, it reportedly takes place under cover. This has become a major national problem posing threat to the declining number of female population. The Supreme Court said that detailed instructions related to this order would be given during the next hearing scheduled on 11 February.
Last week, Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme in Haryana that looks into the welfare of the girl child. In a speech during the launch of the scheme, Modi said "In our neighbourhood, girls are commonly killed in their mothers' wombs and we don't feel the pain," Mr Modi said in a speech in Haryana. "We don't have a right to kill our daughters."
Opposing the Supreme Court's order, representatives from various search engines said that if the key words that allow the advertisements to pop up were blocked then all the content related to the topic would be blocked.
India's child sex ratio has fallen remarkably, with urban areas the worst affected. In the year 2011, New Delhi had the lowest child sex ratio in the country.
