Estimation of Missing Girls at Birth and Juvenile Ages in India

This paper has been commissioned by United Nations Population Fund – UNFPA and reviewed by a wider group of demographers and researchers prior to its finalisation. However, the views expressed and interpretation given in the paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of UNFPA. 1. Introduction It has long been observed that India's population shows an unusually masculine composition. This was generally attributed to higher mortality among females than males in contrast to what has been observed in the western world. However, since the 1990s, the young ages show greater masculinity than in the past and a steep rise in the sex ratio at birth has been observed. There is evidence that sex-selective abortions are widely practiced, facilitated by easy availability of the technology of pre-natal sex-detection and access to medical termination of pregnancy, at least in some parts of the country. This paper, therefore, seeks to provide estimates of the number of sex-selective abortions in the recent years. The analysis is primarily at the national level. However, estimates for Punjab, the state in which the practice of sex-selective abortions is known to be very widely prevalent, are given in the Appendix. Some discussion on regional variations is included in a later section without detailed estimates. It must be mentioned at the outset that this work does not address the social, economic, and institutional causes underlying the resort to sex-selective abortions or the sex-differences in mortality. For some recent Nor does it discuss the consequences of the imbalance caused by sex-selective abortions; these are quite well known. The focus is on estimating the magnitudes of missing girls and sex-selective abortions rather than the socioeconomic determinants.