Characteristics of Sex-Ratio Imbalance in India, and Future Scenarios : Executive Summary

The proportion of boys in India’s child population has been on the rise for the past twenty years, in a way that parallels the experience of other Asian countries, such as China or the Republic of Korea. For the most part, this development has been caused by the increasing practice of sex selection, which has led to unusually high values of the sex ratio at birth. This case-study analysis looks into demographic trends observed in India since 1981, and examines the evolution of the sex ratio over the last decades. India’s system of gender discrimination has moved from a regime characterized by high fertility, female infanticide and excess child mortality among girls, to a modern regime based on prenatal sex selection. At the same time, the significant variations in sex ratio at birth point to the interplay of social, cultural and economic factors in gender preferences.