An International Shame?

In an age of Indian nationalism, where history is rewritten to ignore the Muslim conquests, and the age of pre-history marvels is taught as fact ...

Save The Girl Child Campaign Poster

... then perhaps yet another miracle claimed is no big surprise.

Its a sad fact that in some countries, gender imbalances in favour of males are artificially created by the practice of female infanticide or selective pregnancies (personally I would have wanted girl children if I had had ever been in the position). India has long had a poor reputation in this regard, with stories of girl babies abandoned or killed fairly common, but now often aborted.

Male / Female Sex Ratios Worldwide - Russia's High Male Death Rate Is Reflected.

 

But while its also true that India is not the worst for this deplorable practise (the Saudi's are the worst by far ... with India, Pakistan, China, and some other Arab countries trailing them), and indeed India officially tries to stamp it out ... that doesn't exclude them from the problem, as its legal efforts have reportedly met with  little or limited success.

Now according to the last Indian census, carried out in 2011, there were just 940 women for every 1,000 men in the country, which was one of the highest imbalances in the world (As mentioned, some Arab counties have far larger imbalances). A fact which has historically been the case, for the over 100 years that census data has been collected in India ... this state of affairs was actually hardened with the easy availability of antenatal sex screening from the 1970's, which simply led to tens of millions of female foetuses being aborted as female foeticides, which distorted the sex ratio figures even more in favour of boys.

List of Countries By Sex Ratio (The World Factbook 2020)

 

Despite the introduction of laws to stop this practise, many sex-selective abortions are still believed to be carried out illegally with reports from across India saying that illegal sex determination clinics are thriving. In fact that last census showed that amongst the younger generation, the child sex ratio (which counts children from nought to six years), showed the situation was worsening with just 918 little girls for little 1,000 boys (as women outlive men, the total sex ratio is always higher than the sex ratio at birth). 

In fact India was described as "a country of missing women" by Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen in 1990. That  was after figures showed that the gender ratio had hit a new low with 927 women for every 1,000 men. He had calculated that the number of missing Indian women in 1990 was 37 million.

So imagine the surprise with which the preliminary figures from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) were greeted when they suggested that there are now 1,020 women for every 1,000 men ... a miraculous turnaround and complete reversal of the last two or three centuries trends.

So how can there be such a drastic change in just 10 years? Well that's not a question too many are asking themselves, as the nationalists are gleefully claiming that the figures show that a significant societal shift has occurred in the country. The health ministry reported that this was the first time ever, that the female population had surpassed the male population in India. One official said this was due to the "measures taken by the government for women's empowerment"

The media reported it as a "massive achievement" and "a demographic shift," and one journalist even wrote that India had "now entered the league of developed nations" .... hmm, hyperbole lives on in India.

Of course the fact that the survey only covered about 630,000 of India's 300 million households, and so only the full census data that covers the entire population will reveal the true picture, and some campaigners have simply described the government claims as being "absurd" and "next to impossible," and that the actual deficit of birth should be even larger by 2021. 

So we will wait for the true census figures to see if the nationalists still are hand waving then ... or if in fact there will not have been a substantive improvement in child sex ratio, and in fact have worsened since former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh described it as a "national shame" in 2014.