India's sex ratio at birth improves; Delhi the worst-performing state

Latest data shows improvement after four consecutive years of decline

India’s preference for sons over daughters reduced a little in the three years ending 2018, showing early, though weak, signs of increasing fairness towards the girl child.

In the 2016-2018 period, 1,112 male kids were born per 1,000 female births in India. This situation, however, is still worse than the naturally occurring ratio between 1,030 and 1,050, and the global average of 1,068 as visible in the World Bank data.

Nevertheless, this is a slight improvement from 1,116 male births per 1,000 female births in the 2015-2017 period, data released by the Sample Registration System (SRS) from the Census office shows.

The SRS records indicators such as birth rate and infant mortality rate every year in designated natural divisions in India, and covers about 8 million people.  

Societies world over have largely been hateful towards the girl child, and India has not been any different. India’s official survey of the national economy in 2018 noted that there is, still, a meta-preference for sons among the populace.

The average Indian sex ratio at birth had reached its best at 1,100 males per 1,000 females in 2011-2013. It was worse before that, and it had been deteriorating after 2013, too. The latest period ending 2018 has shown an improvement after four consecutive years of worsening sex ratio.

Kerala and West Bengal have shown a consistent improvement in the past few years. But Bihar, which is largely rural, and Delhi, almost fully urban, have shown an unfettered deterioration in sex ratio at birth.

Experts, however, caution against reading too much into just one year of improvement. “We can call it a societal change only if this improvement is sustained. In reality, couples still prefer the male child,” said Parul Katiyar, a fertility consultant at Nova IVF, a leading treatment centre in Delhi.

She did not find this social change taking place in her more than 10 years of practice. “Affection for a girl child is not so apparent even in infertile couples,” she said.

Seema Jayachandran, an economist at the Northwestern University in Illinois, US, showed in a 2014 paper that the declining fertility rates were linked to worsening sex ratio in India in recent decades.

“The smaller the family size, the less likely a family is to have a son by chance. Thus, declining fertility is one force that is driving up the rate of sex-selective abortions,” she had written.

India’s total fertility rate (TFR), or the number of children a woman generally gives birth to in her fertile lifetime, has been declining gradually, and stands at 2.2 children per woman. At a TFR of 2.1, a population is considered to be stabilised.

Though illegal, sex-selective abortions do happen in India. Experts have repeatedly noted that a skew that is sharper than the natural sex ratio shows clear discrimination towards the female child.

Human births are naturally male-biased at 51.3 per cent of total births during any period, due to more gestational risks to female foetuses, a 2015 study by Orzack and others in the US had found, putting the natural sex ratio at 1,053 male births per 1,000 female ones. Jayachandran assumes it to be close to 1,030 in her paper.

India’s sex ratio at birth, at 1,112, is far worse than this, and thus, despite the small improvement, needs a deeper change in the society.

Neighbours China and Vietnam have a worse sex ratio at 1,126 and 1,118, respectively. Bangladesh, on the other hand, fares better at 1,049 male births per 1,000 female births, according to the World Bank.

A seminal research by Lihong Shi of the Case Western Reserve University, Ohio, US, has shown that families in China started choosing daughters to balance the skewed marriage market. If this is in works in India is still unknown but it does offer insights into India’s trajectory as it has a comparable population and civilisational characteristics.