The InterDependent

When results of India’s 2011 census began to emerge in recent weeks, one statistic was greeted with shock by demographers. The country’s sex ratio of girls to boys at age 6 had plummeted because of gender-selective abortions or the deaths of female infants. For every 1,000 boys counted in India, there were 914 little girls, down from a ratio of 1,000 to 927 in 2001.

In its preference for male children, is India going the way of China, where the ratio is even steeper? (In 2010, the rate in China was 118.06 boys to every 100 girls.)

The news is "very serious," says A.R. Nanda, who in his long career in population studies has been head of the Indian census commission, secretary of health and family welfare and most recently executive director of the independent Population Foundation of India. Like other Indian population experts, he said in an interview in New Delhi that there is an unfortunate relationship between a declining fertility rate and the widening sex ratio. Families intent on having smaller families and boys rather than girls, are aborting female fetuses in larger numbers. In some cases, baby girls are murdered or allowed to die of neglect in infancy.

Sex selection in India has grown with the wider availability of ultrasound equipment to determine the gender of an unborn child. The use of ultrasound, often not very expensive, to determine gender for purposes of choosing the sex of a child is illegal in India, but the law has been widely flouted, Nanda said. As secretary of health (the top permanent professional position in the ministry) he sent decoys into clinics to prove his point, and several practitioners were arrested.

The good news in the census was that the gender ratio has narrowed significantly in Indian states where it was first most stark, such as Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, hopefully pointing to a downward trend. On the other hand, the gap has widened unexpectedly in states that had been considered more progressive, such as Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh in the south. Sex selection has also risen in affluent sections of India’s biggest cities.

At the Population Foundation of India, the current executive director, Poonam Muttreja, says that one factor pushing the aborting of female fetuses and other population issues is the lack of understanding that it is the father’s chromosomes that decide the sex of a baby and that persistent efforts to produce male children may defy nature. She said that there are more than 10 million abortions a year in India, most of them performed on married women, though not all for sex selection.

JOE ROUTON

The 2011 census in India found that for every 1,000 boys counted, there were 914 girls, down from a ratio of 1,000 to 927 in 2001.

"This is tragic," Muttreja said, adding that it speaks to the status of women generally. Abortions – virtually none of them really safe, she noted – account for seven percent of maternal deaths in India, which has a maternal mortality rate almost on par with sub-Saharan Africa. Many if not most of these deaths are preventable, she said.

India has introduced a series of cash incentives to parents who have girls and to educate them. So far, the payments have not had much effect, demographers say.

"We have to appeal to morality," Muttreja said, since laws and incentives have not stopped sex selection or the widespread desire for male children. The reasons include the Hindu custom of a son’s lighting a parent’s funeral pyre, the high cost of (illegal) dowries to marry off girls and the need for another pair of male hands in the fields, though that is a dwindling demand in large rural families in India’s poorest states, where young men often migrate to cities because there is no work for them at home.

Above all, Muttreja and others say, the status of women has to be raised in India, and girls need to be valued more. United Nations agencies, including the Population Fund and Unicef, have supported campaigns to raise awareness about the rights of women and children.

Some Indian demographers are suggesting that as a country already home to the world’s largest population of desperately poor people and numerous insurgencies, India cannot afford a future of restless unmarried young men who cannot find wives or jobs, even if its population growth rate continues to decline and stabilizes in the coming decades.

Amitabh Kundu of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi says that large numbers of unskilled illiterate young men congregating in Indian cities are already deemed a problem. In rural areas, child marriages could increase as families with unmarried sons compete for available girls, some only 10 years old or even younger.

Nanda, the former census commissioner, says that Indians can look to the southern state of Kerala for a model. For decades, Kerala has maintained European-level fertility rates and allowed girls to live healthy lives and to be educated. Standards of living for all its residents have been generally good, which is a related development. The secret? "Gender sensitive policies," Nanda said.