It’s been 400 years since a woman gave birth to a child in a Madhya Pradesh village in India. Locals believe that their village is ‘cursed’ and if a woman gives birth here, then the child or the mother will either die or be deformed.

There are no written rules in Sanka Shyam Ji village of Rajgarh, around 130 km from state capital Bhopal, but women are not allowed to give birth here. They must cross the village and give birth outside if they wish theirs and their child’s well-being, locals believe.

The sarpanch of the village, Narendra Gurjar said, ‘90 per cent of the deliveries takes place in hospitals, and in case of emergency, deliveries take place just outside the village where a room has been built for this purpose.’ Even during rains of extreme weather, women are taken outside the village for child birth, he said, reports the NDTV.

The curse, he believes, was set upon this village when a woman disrupted a temple construction.

The elders of the village claimed that when the temple was being built during the 16th Century, a woman started grinding wheat. This distracted the construction work, and out of anger, Gods cursed the village, saying that no woman would be able to give birth in this village.

The villagers brushed aside any talks of this being a superstition. They say they have witnessed that when some accidental deliveries took place, the child was either deformed or died. To tackle emergencies better, the villagers built a room outside the village for child deliveries.

An elderly man from the village says that no one drinks alcohol or eats meat in this village, and that’s a blessing from God on their village.