The Australian dream is turning the traditional ‘dowry system’ for marriages on its head in India. Brides in Punjab who are undertaking or willing to undertake nursing courses are getting popular and being enticed with the promise of a fully funded education in nursing, reports the Indian newspaper, Hindustan Times.

The high demand for nurses — as brides and otherwise — has caused a spike in the number of private nursing institutes in India the last decade, notes a recent report in The Hindustan Times. According to the report, the Punjab Nurses Registration Council statistics revealed that the number of private institutes offering nursing courses like ANM, GNM, BSc, post-basic BSc and MSc jumped from around 138 in 2006 to 559 in 2014.

The report notes that nurses from Punjab are heading for jobs in as many as 27 countries with the top 3 being Canada, Australia and the United States of America. Other destinations include Tanzania, Botswana, Georgia, Ireland, Norway, Denmark and Finland.

“Not surprisingly thus, the state council and the mushrooming nursing institutes have become a common haunt for wannabe grooms,” notes the report.

"Punjab, a state with poor sex ratio and female literacy figures unlike Kerala, is also increasingly taking the nursing route to foreign shores. And this lure of settling overseas is turning the system of “contract marriage” on its head. In exchange for sponsoring courses and visa fee, women are taking ‘husbands’ to countries like Canada, Australia, US and New Zealand, after getting the NRI tag,” notes the report.

In India, a dowry is an agreed payment and forms part of a traditional ‘marriage contract’ where cash or some kind of gifts are given to a bridegroom's family along with the bride. The dowry system is thought to put great financial burden on the bride's family. It has been cited as one of the reasons for families and women in India resorting to sex selection in favour of sons. This has distorted the sex ratio of India (940 females per thousand males) and may have given rise to female foeticide. The payment of a dowry has been prohibited under The 1961 Dowry Prohibition Act in Indian civil law and subsequently by Sections 304B and 498a of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).

Sources:

http://www.hindustantimes.com/punjab/chandigarh/nursing-foreign-dreams-punjabi-men-fund-contract-bride-s-courses-visa/article1-1259767.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowry_system_in_India