Declining Sex Ratio in India

India’s sex ratio (the number of females per 1,000 male) has declined to 896 in 2015-17 from 898 in 2014-16 as per the Sample Registration System Survey conducted by the office of the registrar general and census commissioner.

What does Survey Say?

• India’s sex ratio stood at 896 for 2015-17, down from 898 in 2014-16 and 900 in 2013-15.
• Of the top 22 states for which data is available, 14 states had a sex ratio better than the all-India average and eight including Delhi, had an inferior number.
• Haryana continued to carry the ignominy of being the most unfair to the girl child among the surveyed states with a sex ratio of 833.

Rural-Urban Divide

• Even though the sex ratio in rural India declined from 902 in 2014-16 to 898 in 2015-17, it is still better than urban India’s 890.
• Seven states had a poorer rural sex ratio than rural India’s average, while 14 had a lower urban sex ratio than the average for urban India.
• The sex ratio at birth in urban areas varies from 950 in Madhya Pradesh to 816 in Uttarakhand.
• The sex ratio at birth in rural areas ranges from 828 to 985 of Haryana and Kerala, respectively.

Even today a large section of Indian society prefers a male child and the affluent more so. People in urban areas are better positioned to exploit the system as they have better access to more and better medical facilities. They often resort to neonatal tests, although these are banned in India. This allows them to abort a girl child. Societies in West Bengal and the North-East are matriarchal traditionally. All these factors depict the wide range of disparities in sex ratio across the country.

It must also be noted that the Sample Registration System Survey data captures only births registered in the records as against the Census that captures all the residents of the country.