General Electric Co. and other companies have sold so many ultrasound machines in India that tests are now available in small towns... GE has waded into India's market as the country grapples with a difficult social issue: the abortion of female fetuses by families who want boys. Campaigners against the practice and some government officials are linking the country's widely reported skewed sex ratio with the spread of ultrasound machines... For more than a decade, the Indian government has tried to stop ultrasound from being used as a tool to determine gender... GE [is] by far the largest seller of ultrasound machines here through a joint venture with...Wipro... "We stress emphatically that the machines aren't to be used for sex determination," says V. Raja, chief executive of GE Healthcare South Asia. "This is not the root cause of female feticide in India."... Earlier this month, prosecutors in the city of Hyderabad brought a criminal case against the GE venture with Wipro as well as Erbis Engineering Co., the...distributor...for...Toshiba... In the suits, the district government alleges that the companies knowingly supplied ultrasound machines to clinics that weren't registered with the government and were illegally performing sex-selection tests... Vivek Paul, who helped build the early ultrasound business in India, first as a senior executive at GE and then at Wipro, says blame should be pinned on unethical doctors... Other vendors include Siemens AG, Philips Electronics NV and Mindray International Medical... The abortion of female fetuses is...poised to escalate as the use of ultrasound services expands, the United Nations Children's Fund said in a report this year. India's "alarming decline in the child sex ratio" is likely to exacerbate child marriage, trafficking of women for prostitution and other problems, the report said...Mr. Raja...acknowledges the company is "aggressive" in pursuing its goals. But he points out that ultrasound machines have broad benefits and make childbirth safer... GE has taken a number of steps to ensure customers comply with the law. It has educated its sales force about the regulatory regime, demanded its own affidavits from customers that they won't use the machines for sex selection, and followed up with periodic audits, say executives. They note that in 2004, the first full year it began implementing these new measures, GE's sales in India shrank by about 10% from the year before...