Today is Daughter’s Day, and Indians are demanding social change.

Daughter’s Day is an Indian social media campaign started by Women & Child Development Minister, Maneka Gandhi, that aims to celebrate daughters, daughters-in-law, and granddaughters—with the ultimate goal of reducing female feticide, improving India’s skewed sex ratio, and educating girls.

Gandhi reports that son-preference has led to the following atrocities:

• Hundreds of thousands of female fetuses are aborted every year.
• At least 22 women are killed over dowries every day.
• Every 22 minutes, a rape is reported.
• Every 5 minutes, a woman is assaulted in her home.

Gandhi is specifically celebrating daughters, daughters-in-law, and granddaughters on Daughter’s Day for the following reasons:

• Daughters: because people think “she’s a burden, she’s inferior to a son, she’s a bad investment since she will marry and leave for her bridal home.”
• Daughters-in-law: because “we are killing them the most” and “we are trying to tell people to treat their daughters-in-law as they would treat their own daughters.”
• Granddaughters: because “in most cases, it’s the mother-in-law who forces her daughter-in-law to abort her female fetus and we are appealing to the grandmothers to let the girl child a chance to be born.”

Read the whole article here.