Estimation of missing girls at birth and juvenile ages in India

Type Report
Title Estimation of missing girls at birth and juvenile ages in India
Author(s)
Publication (Day/Month/Year) 2007
Publisher United Nations Population Fund, UNFP
Country/State India
URL http://countryoffice.unfpa.org/india/drive/MissingGirlsatBirthpaper-August2007Kulkarni.pdf
Abstract
It has long been observed that India’s population shows an unusually masculine composition. This was generally attributed to higher mortality among females than males in contrast to what has been observed in the western world. However, since the 1990s, the young ages show greater masculinity than in the past and a steep rise in the sex ratio at birth has been observed. There is evidence that sex-selective abortions are widely practiced, facilitated by easy availability of the technology of pre-natal sex-detection and access to medical termination of pregnancy, at least in some parts of the country. This paper, therefore, seeks to provide estimates of the number of sex-selective abortions in the recent years. The analysis is primarily at the national level. However, estimates for Punjab, the state in which the practice of sex-selective abortions is known to be very widely prevalent, are given in the Appendix. Some discussion on regional variations is included in a later section without detailed estimates. It must be mentioned at the outset that this work does not address the social, economic, and institutional causes underlying the resort to sex-selective abortions or the sex-differences in mortality. For some recent work on this issue, see Das Gupta and Bhat (1997), Agnihotri (2000, 2003), Mayer (1999), Bhat and Zavier (2007). Nor does it discuss the consequences of the imbalance caused by sex-selective abortions; these are quite well known. The focus is on estimating the magnitudes of missing girls and sex-selective abortions rather than the socioeconomic determinants. This paper follows the international convention of specifying the sex ratio (SR) as number of males per 100 females rather than the practice in India of expressing it as females per thousand males, often called female to male ratio, or FMR; clearly, FMR = 100,000/SR.

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