The dowry probably did not start out as a bad thing. On the contrary, its original purpose was not to demean women but to support them. In Hindu culture, most women have the birth home when they marry and become part of their husband's family. The dowry ensured that they brought their own financial resources with them-money they could use to support themselves and their families if their husband died or abandoned them.
Hindu males, however, stay with the birth family. The eldest son is particularly important since he's responsible for looking after the welfare of his younger siblings, for supporting his parents when they retire, and for conducting the parent's funeral rites.
While men receive their inheritance when their parents die, women receive theirs when they marry. This means that each time a daughter marries, her family sustains a substantial loss of income. There's financial loss in both cases, but families only feel that it when the girl marries because the son keeps his money within the family.
This system has become grotesquely distorted. It has evolved from sending a daughter away with some worldly goods, to would-be-in-laws demanding huge sums of money from parents looking for husbands for their girls. " If she's joining our family, she better bring plenty of income with her!" In other words, these parents sell rights to their sons for exorbitant prices.
The disastrous social consequences are that Hindu families go bankrupt financing the weddings of their daughters. Many families just can't afford to have girls. Now that tests to check the sex of a fetus are available, some Hindus opt for abortion if the fetus is female. That it should come to this is bitterly ironic since Hindu scriptures uniformly condemn abortion.
The opposite practice, of demanding money for a daughter, was strictly forbidden in Hindu law. It smacked too much of prostitution.
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