The Dahiphale family of Parli, in Beed District, staged the procession for a baby named Gargi after she and her mother were discharged, the Indo-Asian News Service reported, describing her as the first girl born to the family in four generations.

Beed's child sex ratio, the number of girls per 1,000 boys aged 0 to 6, fell from 894 in the 2001 census to roughly 800 a decade later, the steepest decline of any district in Maharashtra.

The baby was born to Kalpana Dahiphale, wife of Rishikesh Dahiphale, and mother and child were discharged two days later, the Free Press Journal reported.

They were taken to the family home in Indiranagar, where relatives and neighbors met them with drumbeats, cymbals, fireworks and the distribution of jalebi, a sweet customarily handed out when a girl is born.

Limbaji Dahiphale, the baby's grandfather and headmaster of Bhagwan Primary School in Parli, was visibly emotional through the celebration. He told IANS it was "a great fortune to have a daughter in the family," and that years of quiet regret over the absence of a girl had finally ended.

His wife, Surekha Dahiphale, said the family had settled on the grandest welcome it could arrange while still at the hospital, according to the Deccan Chronicle.

She called the newborn the household's Lakshmi Devi, a reference to the Hindu goddess of wealth and fortune.

Rishikesh Dahiphale told the Deccan Chronicle that while everyone around him had urged him to hope for a son, he had "personally hoped for a daughter." The family would raise her like a flower, he said.

The procession drew crowds through the neighborhood. Social activist Anant Ingle said the celebration challenged the narrow attitudes that still surround the birth of girls in parts of Indian society, The Logical Indian reported.

The district was one of eight in Maharashtra targeted by Lek Laadki Abhiyan, a campaign that ran decoy operations against doctors performing illegal sex determination tests. Its founder, advocate Varsha Deshpande, won the 2025 United Nations Population Award for three decades of that work.

Prenatal sex determination has been illegal across India under the PC-PNDT Act since 1994, but the spread of ultrasound technology from the 1980s onward produced what demographers call the country's missing girls.

The UNFPA's 2020 State of World Population report put India's cumulative total of missing females at 45.8 million, second only to China, out of 142.6 million worldwide. About 460,000 girls went missing at birth each year between 2013 and 2017, the report found.

India's sex ratio at birth stood at 929 girls per 1,000 boys in the most recent National Family Health Survey, and 933 in the Sample Registration System's 2023 report. Both fall below the natural range of 950 to 970.

India remains the world's most populous country, with an estimated 1.46 billion people. Its total fertility rate has fallen to 1.9 children per woman, below the 2.1 replacement level, according to the UNFPA's 2025 State of World Population report.