When Prime Minister Narendra Modi launched the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao scheme on a January morning in 2015, he chose not the sanitised confines of New Delhi’s bureaucracy but Panipat, Haryana, the ground zero of India’s demographic catastrophe. The state’s child sex ratio had collapsed to 819 per 1,000 boys.

What followed was not a typical welfare programme. Over the past decade, Modi returned to the Red Fort ramparts eleven times on Independence Day to centre the girl child as emblematic of national progress. This constancy and the refusal to let the issue fade transformed BBBP from a sectoral initiative into a political movement. The results suggest something important: sustained top-level messaging can reshape how a nation sees itself and its daughters.

The data bears this out. India’s sex ratio at birth improved from 914 in 2011 to 930 by 2023, a modest improvement numerically, but seismic demographically. The most striking change was seen in Haryana’s Kurukshetra district, where the sex ratio swung from 743 to 980 in five years. Sonepat also moved from 808 to 939, showing reversals of long-term decline.

India has implemented gender-focused education programmes for over two decades. Yet enrolment gains had stalled. Girls’ secondary enrolment crept forward at a sluggish pace. What changed in 2014 was not funding, even though the resources invested did increase, but the location of the message. From the Red Fort, from the seat of national symbolism, Modi repeatedly questioned the patriarchal assumptions embedded in Indian homes. “Why do parents interrogate their daughters about where they go, but never........

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