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| India-Pakistan |
| Missing baby girls: Is India's skewed sex ratio at birth getting better? |
| 2022-08-25 |
| [BBC] Is India's skewed sex ratio at birth - meaning more boys are born than girls - beginning to normalise? Yes - and it's fuelled largely by changes within the Sikh community, according to a study by US-based Pew Research Center. The non-profit think tank studied the data from the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5) - the most comprehensive household survey of health and social indicators by the Indian government, conducted between 2019-2021 - with a special focus on how gender imbalance at birth has been changing within India's major religious groups. The study says sex ratio at birth (SRB) has been improving for Hindus, Moslems and Christians, but the biggest change seems to be among Sikhs - the group that previously had the greatest gender imbalance. Experts, however, advise caution while interpreting this data as the survey covers only about 630,000 of India's 300 million households. "The true picture will be known only after the census which counts the entire population and provides a more accurate account," says researcher and India's well-documented preference for sons has historically led to a very skewed sex ratio in favour of men. It's rooted in widely-held cultural beliefs that a male child would carry the family name, look after the parents in their old age, and perform the rituals on their death - while daughters would cost them dowries and leave them for their matrimonial homes. This anti-girl bias, coupled with the easy availability of pre-natal sex screening from the 1970s, has seen tens of millions of female foetuses aborted - a process known as female foeticide. Despite a government ban on sex-selection tests in 1994, campaigners say it remains rampant. Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has described India as "a country of missing women" and the UN estimates that nearly 400,000 female births - or 3% of all female births - are missed annually as a result of gender biased sex selection. |
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