The Pink Ladoo project in Australia, Canada and the UK takes a traditional sweet shared at the birth of a son to say that girls should be celebrated too

When Raj Khaira’s brother was born, ladoos, a popular celebratory Indian sweet, were sprinkled among the community like confetti. When her sister came along, the extended family cried.

Which is why Khaira, now a lawyer, launched the Pink Ladoo project a year ago to mark the International Day of the Girl Child. This year she brought it to London and locations in Canada as well.

The idea is simple: hand out pink ladoos when a daughter is born as a counterpoint to the golden sweets distributed at the birth of a son.

“The pink ladoo is a symbol of protest against gender bias, one that you can make sense of immediately,” says Khaira. “The birth announcement is the first tradition to be skewed towards the male child, and the pink ladoos hope to change that.

“Diaspora communities tend to hold on to customs stubbornly, and we want them to analyse the gender bias in them. The response to the campaign both offline and on social media has been phenomenal.

“Most interestingly, the staff at the hospitals have given us great feedback, saying the disappointment of bearing a daughter is a larger issue than most people realise.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A girl and a woman walk past a billboard in New Delhi encouraging the birth of girls. Photograph: Raveendran/AFP/Getty Images

The preference for boys in India starts before birth: tens of thousands of girls are thought to be aborted each year, resulting in a wildly distorted gender ratio. India’s most recent census found there were 940 girls born for every 1,000 boys. The skew is worst in Haryana, a rural, northern state bordering Delhi, where just 830 girls are born for every 1,000 boys.



The gloom surrounding the birth of girls prompted Navi Brar, a 24-year-old nurse from Alberta in Canada, to get involved with Khaira’s campaign. “I always found myself being the one person speaking up to family members for making any parent feel remorse for having a baby girl,” she says. “I felt this campaign allowed me to stand up for gender equality, and reach a bigger audience.”

She says such a campaign is more relevant than ever because of the significant strides south Asian women have made, and continue to make – despite girls in the community still being viewed as less important than their male counterparts.

“This cultural preference for males goes far past birth and continues to follow girls throughout their lifetime. I think this campaign is challenging south Asians, men and women, to stand up and provoke change in the traditional mentality and create a new normal of celebrating both boys and girls.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Pink Ladoo project runs social media campaigns throughout the year. Photograph: Courtesy of Pink Ladoo campaign

The project is not a once-a-yearevent. Throughout other months the group runs social media campaigns, sharing stories of inspiring everyday women, posts from families who have celebrated their daughters with pink ladoos, and stories of the slights that mothers of girls have faced. A recent viral social media post told the powerful story of a bride whose mother gave her away at her wedding – a ritual traditionally reserved for men.

The positive response to the post left the bride’s mother, UK-based Jasbir Kaur, feeling vindicated. “I knew it would be a big deal in my community but I never thought something so personal to my family would gain global reach; I was simply fulfilling my duty as a parent,” she says.

“In that moment and after, the feeling I had was a sense of achievement.Since I played the dual role of mother and father, I felt it was my absolute right to do this.

“There is still a long way to go in changing people’s mindsets over gender-based roles, but the Pink Ladoo project is a step in the right direction. They are questioning the unfairness, which was not easy for my generation to do.”

The best compliment, says Khaira, was when she called a UK sweet shop to ask them to participate and make pink ladoos – and found that they were already one of their best-selling sweets.