Worrying sex ratio trends among states

Worrying sex ratio trends among states

Media reports a sharp fall in the ratio of new-born girls to boys in several states. Surprisingly, three southern states, better performers on many socioeconomic parameters, show large declines. Between 2007 and 2016, the number of new-born girls (age zero to one) fell by 168 for every 1,000 boys born in Andhra Pradesh; Karnataka saw a decline of 108, Tamil Nadu, 95 (the figure might be distorted by counting registration of own birth by men years after the fact), Odisha, 61, and northern Uttarakhand, 44. The same social attitudes that make life unsafe for women in India underlie the worsening sex ratio as well.

These numbers are collated from births registered under the civil registration system (CRS), the most detailed birth database. The activist argument that female births are under-counted holds no water: Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu record 100% of all births; Karnataka has varied between 100% in 2012 and 98% in 2014, and Odisha registers 98.5%. Data for these states are more accurate than, say, Bihar, whose sex ratio could be biased by only 64% births getting registered. The census data shows a fall in sex ratio between 2001 and 2011 in the three southern states apart from Kerala, and Odisha. Worse, these states have gone the opposite way from Haryana, Punjab and Delhi, whose previous low sex ratios have improved consistently between 2001 and 2016.

Among big countries, India has the second-worst female-to male ratio (0.89) after China (0.87), because of strong male-child preference and attempts to curb family size by fiat. The persistence of such trends will lead to growing numbers of bachelors, declining population and dilute the ‘demographic dividend’. Radical shift in traditional attitudes towards women is an economic and social imperative.