The lot of women in India is bad but nowhere is it as bad as in the north and west including Delhi. The preference for boys is so intense that in Haryana there are just 822 girls to 1000 boys. This means that large numbers of young men can find no girl to marry. One way is to buy a girl from poorer part of India such as the north east and then share her between several brothers. The young woman is made to do all the housework and raped by one of the brothers in turn. Such misery is hard to imagine. Seems that an alternative is to exchange girls between families. If a family has a son as well as a daughter then they demand that the groom's family give a girl to the son in exchange. The groom's family will then give any girl they have even if she is 11 or 12 years old. Yet even in this shortage of girls the evil of dowry still persists. The greed for material wealth is such that the grooms family tries to gouge whatever it can and will torture the young woman if their demands are not fulfilled. Often the girl will be killed or will commit suicide unable to bear the torture. The shocking thing is that it is women who are the prime movers in this systematic degradation of other women. Is it because they want to avenge the rough treatment they underwent in their youth or something genetic like the totally irrational love of gold among Indian women it is hard to tell. Sadly it is probably the girls killed off before birth who are lucky.