At 31, Bijli Devi weighs just 44 kg. Weak and pregnant, she has come to Katlupur sub-centre in Sonipat district for a routine vaccination. The doctor has flagged her pregnancy as high risk. This is her seventh in 12 years. She has six daughters, 2 to 12. “I have little choice,” she says. Her husband, an agricultural labourer, and in-laws want a son. She doesn’t know what will happen if the seventh is a girl too. Her two oldest daughters have dropped out of school. They now work as farm labourers alongside their father. “We never went for sex-determination,” Bijli Devi adds. “We don’t have the means.” A sex-determination test, illegal in India, costs ₹50,000-60,000 on the black market.In May this year, a secret sex-determination racket, running in the middle of Gurugram, was busted. At Aayu Hospital in Hari Nagar, a mere 2 kilometres north of Sector 37 police station, along the frenetic arterial stretch of Khandsa Road off the Delhi-Jaipur Highway, sleuths dismantled a syndicate peddling prenatal gender testing. Arrested consultant radiologist Manjit Kumar would allegedly conduct the sex-determination test for ₹40,000.Here, in the pulsating heart of the Millennium City, directly opposite the cacophonous Sector 10A market, thrived the illicit sex-determination centre. This, more than a decade after the clarion call of “Beti Bachao Beti Padhao” (BBBP) echoed from Panipat, more than a thousand surgical raids executed, and upwards of 4,000 miscreants incarcerated.The bust wasn’t just about catching criminals. It exposed a deeper failure: the slow collapse of monitoring and the fading fear of law among offenders. For the enforcement teams, the brazenness of it all was a jolt.The rupture surfaced against an ominous backdrop: Haryana’s Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB) has plummeted to 898 girls per 1,000 boys in the first four months of 2026. Only four of the 23 districts — Nuh, Rewari, Sonipat, and Panchkula — breached the 900 mark. At the bottom of the table, Charkhi Dadri recorded 768 girls per 1,000 boys. Since BBBP’s inception, annual SRB figures had ascended, cresting at 923 in both 2019 and 2025.The May raid revealed an uncomfortable truth. Between the gap of slogans and supervision lies the old persistent practice of eliminating female foetuses.