Female infanticide has been practiced around the world for millennia and it still happens.

This is predominantly the case in poverty-stricken areas where dowries are common and families know that the will never be able to pay for their daughter to have a life within their village. These girls are seen as too great a financial burden.

In India, where the caste system has technically been abolished but still thrives culturally, it’s still common to find villages where there are no official birth records of girls for months at a time.

Because of the statistical impossibility of this occurring naturally, it’s clear that those babies have been aborted or killed after birth.

But in one Indian village – the birth of a baby girl has come to be celebrated as a special occasion.

When a girl is born in Piplantri (located in the Rajasthan State, in northwest India) the entire village comes together to secure her future and that of the village.

It’s an incredible gesture on everyone’s part to honor women with a unique and unexpected type of eco-feminism.

Piplantri started this program in 2006.

It’s the brainchild of Shyam Sundar Paliwal, a former village head whose daughter Kiran passed away that year at the age of 16.

In their mourning, the family planted a burflower tree in her name to mark her death and honor her memory.

This sparked an idea in her father about acknowledging the importance of women.

The year the initiative began, the village identified families who were reluctant to bring their baby girl into the world or keep her. According to the English-language newspaper of India, The Hindu, this amounted to roughly half of the families in the village of 6-8,000 residents (estimates differ by source).

In order to change the way women are viewed and link them with the economic health and sustainability of the village as a whole, a committee was formed to offer these families a deal under the “Kiran Nidhi Yojana” scheme.

When the girl is born, her family signs an agreement in which they promise to tend to 111 trees planted in her name.

The number 111 is said to bring success.

They also vow to send their daughter to school and wait until she has reached the legal age of 18 before asking her to consent to a marriage. This gives women a chance at a self-sufficient life that they lack in many parts of the country (and the world).

But the investment in each girl is even bigger than that!

While many families worry about the economic implications of raising a girl, Piplani has eliminated that concern by enlisting everyone in the village to contribute to her future.

A girl’s parents pledge to contribute $180 to an account for her while the rest of the villagers contribute a combined $380 for her.

But the funds must go towards things that will improve her life, such as school fees. They can also accrue interest and more money is deposited with each educational milestone.

Those 111 trees per child have now surpassed a quarter of a million – and many of them bear fruit that can be collected and eaten or sold.

Roughly 60-65 girls are born each year in the village – and it is illegal to cut down the trees.

An enormous forest is now thoughtfully tended to by villagers in their daughters’ honor and the trees have contributed to the economic growth of the area in another important way as well. After planting aloe vera around the patches of forest to keep pests such as termites away, the villagers ended up with a new source of income.

“Gradually, we realized that aloe vera could be processed and marketed in a variety of ways. So we invited some experts and asked them to train our women. Now residents make and market aloe vera products like juice, gel, pickle etc,” a villager told The Hindu.

Paliwal’s personal tragedy is now a driving force behind the sustainability of the region.

The girls are far more protected here than in other villages, there is new natural material to be sold for profit, and residents now have new employment opportunities as a result.

The girls in the village have an opportunity to get an education and relieve the financial burden their families still carry under cultural norms. It doesn’t fix every problem, but it’s a concerted effort to begin valuing women the way they deserve.

“For me, everything is linked: the girl child, the land, water, animals, birds, trees. I seek immortality through these trees,” Paliwal told The Guardian in 2018. “Whatever I do is for my daughter’s memory.”

Be sure to scroll down below to learn more about Piplantri’s unique tradition.

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Source: Piplantri via Facebook, Al Jazeera, TIME, The Hindu, The Guardian
H/t: Brightside