6-hour-old baby girl in Odisha is rescued by local villagers after being buried alive

The area where she was discovered is one of many impoverished states where families hope for sons and go to any lengths possible to avoid having to raise a daughter.

Chief medical officer Jajpur district Fanindra Kumar Panigrahi told AFP: ‘She is doing fine and all her parameters are normal. She is a full term baby, weighing around 2.5 kg.

‘Her umbilical cord was intact and body was still covered with vernix.’

A witness who helped with the rescue, Alok Rout, said: ‘It was a little kid who first saw the feet of the child buried under a compost dump in a field.

‘Later we rushed to the spot and rescued the newborn girl.’

He said a group helped rescue the girl who was found with her face covered with a piece of cloth.

Hospital staff have named the girl Dharitri, a Sanskrit word meaning ‘the earth’.

The girl will be handed over to the state-run child welfare committee after she is discharged from the Dharmasala hospital.

Police told AFP they suspect the newborn was either abandoned by her parents because of her gender or the mother had been an unmarried woman.

Local police officer Jyoti Prakash Panda said: ‘We are trying to track the parents of the girl. Chances are it was a case of female feticide and it is clear that the accused wanted to kill her.’

Police Inspector Amitabh Mohapatra added: ‘A case has been lodged against the unidentified parents of the child and family members. An investigation is on to find out where the child was born and under which circumstances it was buried.’

India is struggling to bridge the sex ratio gap with tough laws as the country fares badly with 940 females for every 1,000 males, according to the last official census in 2011.

Earlier this month police recovered 19 female fetuses from a sewer in western Maharashtra state and accused a doctor of illegally aborting them for parents desperate for a boy.

On Monday a female fetus was found buried near a sewer in New Delhi after dogs were spotted digging the earth around it.

India banned prenatal sex determination to stop its misuse, although the tests are still thought to be common, particularly in poor rural areas.

A 2011 study in the British medical journal The Lancet found that up to 12 million girls had been aborted in the last three decades in India.

Hospital staff have named the girl Dharitri, a Sanskrit word meaning ‘the earth’