The sex ratio is a measure of the sex composition of a population. India follows the convention of expressing it as the number of females per thousand males, so a falling figure means a worsening position for women; most international statistics invert this, reporting males per hundred females, and confusing the two is a common examination error. The Census of India has reported the ratio at every decennial count since 1901, and the long series shows a population that has been male-surplus throughout, with the deficit deepening for most of the twentieth century before a modest recovery in the overall ratio in recent decades.

Three variants must be kept apart. The overall sex ratio covers all ages and therefore reflects the accumulated effect of births, deaths at every age and migration. The child sex ratio, conventionally computed for the age group 0 to 6 years, is much the more sensitive social indicator, since it is shaped almost entirely by what has happened to a single cohort of girls in the recent past and is not confounded by adult mortality or long-distance migration. The sex ratio at birth isolates the moment of birth and is the measure through which prenatal sex selection announces itself; India's civil registration and the Sample Registration System, along with the National Family Health Survey, are the sources used to track it.

Why a male-biased ratio is a social fact

Biology delivers a narrow and well-known range. Slightly more boys than girls are born everywhere — the natural sex ratio at birth clusters within a well-defined band across populations — and thereafter male mortality is higher at almost every age, so that a population left to biology alone tends towards a female surplus, which is what Europe, North America and sub-Saharan Africa display. Where a female deficit appears instead, and especially where it appears among children, biology cannot be the explanation. In Durkheim's sense the ratio is a social fact: an aggregate outcome produced by countless private decisions about whether a pregnancy continues, how a sick child is treated and who eats last, decisions that are patterned by institutions and therefore stable enough to be counted.

Determinants

The proximate mechanisms are two, and their relative weight has shifted over time. The older mechanism is excess female mortality through differential care — later and less use of hospitals for daughters, shorter breastfeeding, less nutritious food and smaller shares of it, delayed treatment of illness, and, in some periods and regions, outright female infanticide. Barbara Miller's fieldwork in north India documented this pattern of neglect and gave it the name of the endangered sex. The newer mechanism is sex-selective abortion, which became widely available from the 1980s as ultrasonography spread, and which shows up as a distorted sex ratio at birth and a falling child sex ratio.

Behind both lies son preference, and behind son preference a set of institutional arrangements. Patrilineal inheritance makes the son the transmitter of property and name; patrilocal residence means a daughter leaves at marriage and her labour and care accrue to another household, so that raising her is investment in someone else's future; dowry and the expense of a prestigious marriage make her a net cost; ritual obligations, notably the performance of the funeral rites, make a son necessary for a good death; and old age security in the absence of pensions runs through sons. Leela Dube analysed the kinship logic through which a daughter is figured as a temporary member and a guest in her natal home, and showed how seed and earth metaphors of procreation underwrite the priority of the male line.

Two structural conditions intensify the effect. Falling fertility compresses the desired number of children, so that the wish for at least one son must be satisfied within two births rather than five — the arithmetic of what demographers call intensified son preference. And the spread of ultrasound technology made selection cheap, private and, unlike infanticide, socially unremarkable.

Sen's missing women

Amartya Sen gave the phenomenon its most influential formulation. Comparing the sex ratios of South and West Asia and China with those of regions where women receive comparable care, and applying the latter's ratio to the former's population, he calculated a very large number of missing women — women who would be alive had they not been subject to unequal survival chances. The essay that popularised the estimate appeared in 1990, and the figure has since been recomputed by others with varying assumptions. Sen's point was analytical rather than arithmetical: mortality is a form of gender inequality as measurable as wage gaps, and it belongs to the same argument as his work on capability and on the effect of women's literacy and paid employment outside the home on their bargaining position within it.

The paradox of prosperity

The strongest evidence that the ratio is social lies in a pattern that defeats any simple developmental expectation. Some of India's most prosperous, most agriculturally productive and most educated regions — Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Gujarat, parts of Maharashtra and the National Capital Region — recorded among the worst child sex ratios, and the deterioration was often sharpest in urban and better-off districts and among educated mothers, precisely those with access to diagnostic technology and the means to pay for it. Prosperity supplied the instrument; it did not dissolve the preference. Conversely, Kerala has long shown a female-surplus overall ratio, and the north-eastern states and much of the south have generally fared better.

Tim Dyson and Mick Moore offered the classic explanation for the geography. North India, they argued, is characterised by exogamous, village-out marriage, strong village exogamy rules, purdah, and a kinship system that severs a woman from her natal kin; the south permits marriage within the kin group and closer to home, sustaining continuing ties and greater female autonomy, which registers in demographic behaviour. Satish Agnihotri's later work refined the map, distinguishing the effects of caste composition, female labour force participation in rice-growing regions and tribal populations, whose ratios are typically more balanced. Attributing everything to a north–south line is now regarded as too crude, since Kerala and Punjab differ on much besides kinship, and pockets of severe deficit exist in the south as well.

The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act, 1994, amended in 2003, prohibits the communication of the sex of a foetus, requires the registration of all diagnostic clinics, mandates record keeping and forbids advertisement of sex determination services. Note what it does and does not do: it regulates disclosure and technology, not abortion, which remains legal on the grounds specified in the Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act. Enforcement has depended on inspections, sting operations and sealed machines, and convictions have been few relative to the scale of the practice, since the transaction involves a willing family and a willing doctor and leaves little documentary trace.

The deeper limitation is conceptual. A law can raise the cost of an act; it cannot by itself change the preference that motivates it, and a suppressed practice may simply migrate to unregistered clinics or across district lines. Nor is the law without cost to women: strict scrutiny of clinics can reduce access to legitimate obstetric care and to safe abortion. This is why the remedies that appear to work are those that alter the value of a daughter — inheritance rights for daughters under the amended Hindu Succession Act, girls' schooling and paid employment, conditional transfer schemes, and pension provision that loosens the dependence on sons — combined with sustained registration of births and public reporting of the ratio at district level.

For the UPSC answer

State the Indian convention first and define the three variants, then use the child sex ratio as your principal indicator and say why it is the cleanest one. Establish that the deficit is social by contrasting the biological expectation of a female surplus with the observed pattern, and split the causes into the older mechanism of excess female mortality through differential care and the newer one of prenatal selection, both resting on the kinship logic of patriliny, patrilocality and dowry. Sen's missing women, Dyson and Moore on female autonomy, Miller on neglect and Dube on kinship give you four citations; the prosperity paradox of Punjab and Haryana against Kerala is the illustration that shows you understand the argument rather than the slogan. Finish on the PCPNDT Act as a regulation of technology whose limits point to the need to change the value placed on daughters, and cite Census of India and the National Family Health Survey as your data sources rather than quoting figures loosely.

References & further reading

  1. Sen, A. (1990). More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing. New York Review of Books, 37(20).
  2. Miller, B. D. (1981). The Endangered Sex: Neglect of Female Children in Rural North India. Cornell University Press.
  3. Dyson, T. & Moore, M. (1983). On Kinship Structure, Female Autonomy, and Demographic Behavior in India. Population and Development Review, 9(1).
  4. Dube, L. (1997). Women and Kinship: Comparative Perspectives on Gender in South and South-East Asia. United Nations University Press.
  5. Agnihotri, S. B. (2000). Sex Ratio Patterns in the Indian Population: A Fresh Exploration. Sage.
  6. Government of India (1994). Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act.