NEW DELHI: Meghalaya stood out as an “ideal state” in a comparative study of sex ratios across the country.
Economic Survey 2017-18, which was released on Monday, revealed a skewed sex ratio in the country.
Many parents are opting to have more children till they have the desired number of sons, which the survey calls the son ‘meta’ preference, and suggests that while it avoids sex-selective abortion, it can still hurt female children by reducing the resources available to them.
“Families where a son is born are more likely to stop having children than families where a girl is born. This is suggestive of parents employing ‘stopping rules’,” says the survey, which was led by Chief Economic Advisor Arvind Subramanian.
As a result of this son ‘meta’ preference, the economic survey estimates that India could have as many as 21 million “unwanted girls”, i.e. girls whose parents wanted to have sons instead. To arrive at this conclusion, the survey looked at an indicator called the sex ratio of the last child (SRLC), using decades of data from the demographic and health survey.
This indicator is likely to be heavily skewed in favour of boys if the society has a preference for sons, as is seen in India.
According to the World Health Organisation, the natural “sex ratio at birth” is considered to be 1.05. This means that at birth, on average, there are 105 males for every 100 females.
However, Meghalaya stands out as an ideal state because both sex ratio at birth and sex ratio of the last child are close to the benchmark. States like Kerala do not seem to practice sex selective abortions (since their sex ratios at birth are close to the biological benchmark) but indicate some son ‘meta’ preference (skewed SRLC), the study says.
The sex ratio of the first child in Indian households with more than one child is 1.07, fairly close to the biologically determined natural sex ratio.
But the sex ratio of the last child for first-borns is 1.82 – heavily skewed towards boys, according to the authors of the survey.
The contrast becomes clearer when India is compared to a country like Indonesia where the SRLC is close to the ideal sex ratio. This is regardless of birth order and whether or not the child is the last to be born.
Northern states of Punjab and Haryana shows both extremely high son preferences and son ‘meta’ preferences. “In some sense, once born, the lives of women are improving,” the survey says, “but society still appears to want fewer of them,” it added.
