Skewed sex ratio may fuel unrest, says study

The population of young girls in India is falling compared to that of boys, which can "spur great social unrest", a government study has said.

Updated on: Sep 4, 2010, 01:05:37 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The population of young girls in India is falling compared to that of boys, which can "spur great social unrest", a government study has said.

A ministry of statistics and programme implementation report, Men and Women in India, 2010, has found that the proportion of girls in the 0-14 age group of the total population of women was 33 per cent in 2005. The percentage fell to 31.9 per cent in 2008.

In case of boys, the trend was reverse. The proportion of boys in the 0-14 age group of in the total population of men increased from 31.8 per cent in 2008 to 32.5 percent in 2008.

Referring to this trend, the report said: "Though decreasing growth pattern of overall population is a healthy indicator, projected trend also indicates growth pattern for the girl child which may spur great social unrest." However, social unrest is not defined.

The trend might not surprise experts in population studies as the birth of boys as compared to girls has been rising in India, and more so since 1991.

The report says that for every 100 girls born in 1991, 105 boys were born, which increased to 107 in 2001 and 112 in 2009.

Warning that soon there might not be enough girls for boys to marry, Ranjana Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research said that the bias against the girl child was not the only factor to blame. It indicated failure of government policies on the skewed sex ratio.

"The law (Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act) to prevent female foeticide is poorly implemented. There has been no meeting to review the law in the past one year, although it should happen every three months," she said.

Although the number of boys is rising, the report said the number of women in the reproductive age group (15-44) had changed a little. "Reproductive age group has inflated only by addition of 1.5 per cent between 2000 and 2008," the report said.

Overall, the report says Indian women still lag behing men on socio-economic criteria even though data shows improvement in all indicators for women.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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