A newborn baby girl was found buried alive in a shallow grave in India. Bareilly officer Abhinandan Singh told local news media in Uttar Pradesh that the four-day-old infant had been found buried three feet deep in a clay pot and was discovered by Hitesh Kumar, a man who was attempting to bury his stillborn daughter.

"We are trying to find the parents of the baby and we suspect that this must have happened with their consent," Singh said, adding that the area where the baby was buried was "quite isolated,"

Kumar found the baby wrapped in a cloth and crying on Thursday. “At one point I thought that my daughter had come alive. But the voice was actually coming from inside the pot,” he told the Times of India. After she was found, a cemetery security guard notified police who took the infant to a nearby hospital. The girl is now being treated in the Special Newborn Care Unit of the Maharana Pratap District Hospital in Bareilly.

Doctors caring for the girl says she weighs 2.4lb and may have survived thanks to her small size since she required less oxygen. The girl did have some infections, but doctors speculate that she may have only buried for a few hours. Rajesh Kumar Mishra, a local politician, is said to be paying for the girl's medical care.

The discovery comes after a three-week-old baby was found buried alive, just 70km away from Bareilly in Shahjahanpur. She was rescued in January and rushed to a hospital where doctors managed to save her.

In India, many regions have seen the number of males grow disproportionately over females in the last few decades, according to NGO Human Rights Watch. Many families use sex-selective abortion to give preference to boys even though gender screening is illegal. India was ranked 130 out of 151 countries in last year's Gender Inequality Index, an annual report compiled by the United Nations Development Program.

RELATED: Baby Abandoned And Buried Alive In The Forest Rescued After 9 Hours

Daughters are considered financial burdens in some sections of Indian society as a result of gender biases in the workplace and the social expectation that parents will pay a dowry when women get married. Although a dowry of money or goods is also illegal in India, it is still relatively common in some regions.