Missing women

Missing women

Falling sex ratios at birth must be reversed, they will have huge social and economic costs.

In what raises serious concerns about India’s gender imbalance, data collated by the office of the Registrar General of India indicate a downward trend in sex ratio at birth. Even more worrying is a dramatic drop among southern states – barring Kerala – between 2007 and 2016. For example, Tamil Nadu is sixth from the bottom among bigger states, with its ratio falling from 935 in 2007 to 840 in 2016. Similarly, Karnataka went from a very healthy ratio of 1,004 to 896 over the same period. Andhra Pradesh registered an even sharper drop in just one year, going from 971 in 2015 to 806 in 2016.

Given that most of these southern states have achieved near 100% registration of births, the drop should not be due to lack of registration of female births. But several experts contend while the trend is alarming and real, the southern ratios in 2016 are too low, suggesting some problem with the registration system. As the overall ratio for the country too has declined from 903 in 2007 to 877 in 2016, another likely explanation is that the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act is not serving as an effective deterrent against sex-selective abortions.

A 2016 review of the National Health Mission had noted that this is largely due to lack of witnesses and insufficient evidence that stymie prosecution. Often times the Act itself is insufficiently used in drafting court complaints. Add to this other technical loopholes such as the Act being silent on how to dispose of old ultrasound machines which can be easily reused for sex determination. And with the social preference for the male child still intact, we are looking at a recipe for social and economic disaster. The law must be implemented in letter and spirit.

The government’s Economic Survey last year had highlighted this gender crisis by updating Amartya Sen’s estimate of 40 million missing women in India to 63 million. This is a huge loss of human resource, something that is also echoed in declining labour participation of women in India which dipped from 36% in 2005-06 to 24% in 2015-16. IMF chief Christine Lagarde had said that increasing women’s participation in the workforce to the level of men could boost the Indian economy by 27%. Unfortunately, social attitudes continue to be stubborn. The Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign needs more teeth to make a desirable dent here.