A 22-year-old woman from West Bengal has been arrested in Ghaziabad for allegedly killing her newborn daughter barely 45 minutes after giving birth at her sister’s home.
Police said Jharna allegedly wanted to throw the newborn from the terrace to a vacant plot behind the house, but the baby instead fell onto a neighbour’s roof.
The incident came to light on the morning of December 5, when Vinay Rawat, a resident of Nehru Nagar, spotted the body of a newborn on his roof and alerted police.
“The baby appeared to have been born only a few hours earlier. We immediately cordoned off the area and conducted videography and forensic examination of the spot,” said ACP (Nandgram) Upasana Pandey.
As police began door-to-door inquiries, a neighbour told them that a man named Shankar Sen — originally from Paschim Medinipur in West Bengal – was living as a tenant in the adjoining house, and his sister-in-law, Jharna, had arrived nearly a month ago and was visibly pregnant.
When police reached the house, they found Jharna with her sister, Savita.
Initially, Jharna told the police that she and her sister were “too poor” to go to a hospital and had therefore opted for a home delivery. She claimed that the newborn “wasn’t breathing” at birth and that she and her sister tried to dispose of what they believed to be a stillborn child.
But the postmortem report contradicted her statement.
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According to officials, the doctor who conducted the autopsy said the newborn was alive when she suffered fatal injuries on her fall.
“Her skull was broken. Her arm and leg bones were fractured. The injuries were caused within an hour of her birth,” the postmortem report concluded.
Confronted with the findings, police said, Jharna broke down during questioning and confessed to throwing her girl child alive from the terrace.
During the two-hour questioning, a disturbing chain of events surfaced. Police said Jharna, who married Badal from Darbhanga, Bihar, a year and a half ago, had been desperate for a son.
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“She disclosed that she had undergone a fetal sex determination test five months ago at a private nursing home in Darbhanga, which is an illegal procedure. The test indicated she was carrying a girl,” a police officer said.
Police said that she had earlier visited a hospital alone for an abortion. When doctors refused, citing medical complications, she consulted the women in her extended family and took medications suggested by them.
“As her health deteriorated further, she told her husband that she wished to stay with her sister in Ghaziabad for a few days. He agreed. She arrived at her sister’s home in Ghaziabad’s Nehru Nagar on November 14. In the early hours of December 5, Jharna went into labour. Despite her sister urging her to go to the hospital, she refused and delivered the baby at home around 6 am. She said that after she realised the baby was a girl, she panicked and was afraid of informing her husband. She walked to the terrace, and seeing the vacant plot behind the house, she decided to throw the baby there,” ACP Pandey said.
Jharna has been booked under Section 91 of the BNS for causing the death of a newborn. “A DNA test will be conducted to establish the maternity conclusively. Efforts are underway to contact the woman’s husband in Darbhanga,” the ACP said.
