Just read Harini’s post on the 60 million missing children – how to name it? Readying myself for the enlightening and amusing comments containing the “ist” words – activist and feminist – I urge you to head there right now and read it. (And no, don’t even bother mentioning Hepatitis to me).
And just today, I came across this intriguing statistic on the difference in sex ratio between urban and rural India. (It is part of a larger research on “Household Consumer Expenditure
and Employment-Unemployment Situation in India” conducted by the National Sample Survey Organisation – 2003 data).
Here it is.
Sex ratio (no. of females per 1000 males)
Rural 957 Urban 932
Sex ratio among adults
Rural 982 Urban 930
Sex ratio among children
Rural 915 Urban 939
Given the deplorable situation, overall rural India has a better sex ratio.
The sex ratio among adults (defined as persons aged 14 and more) is much better in rural India – which to me, is startling data
Among children, rural India seems worse off, but the gap is still not as large as in the case of adults.
Does this mean that female infanticide in rural areas is a newer phenomenon as compared to urban? There must be some explanation for this which eludes me now… I need to think about this a lot more before I begin to understand what is happening… What are your thoughts?
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Working!
Two explanations:
1) Family planning – as people start preferring smaller families, they start placing a premium on male children. If they are only going to have two children, they’d rather not have two girls. Unfortunate result of “progress”. This phenomenon has been seen in China too.
2) The world over, the sex-ratio is favourable to women. That is because after men reach adolescence they are apt to do crazy things like fight wars and try to win the Darwin awards. So I suppose that this natural tendency reasserts itself reducing the skew in their favour.
Charu
The obvious explanation for the improving male-female gender ratio in the rural community is migration. Men are more mobile than women. So Single men leave the farms and go to the cities.
Ravi, this phenomenon has been seen in China – the government there has relaxed the one child norm in case of very poor families where the first born is a girl…
and I have no idea how the second point is related to the unfavorable gender ratio in India…?
Michael, I dont think the gender ratio is actually *improving* anywhere in the country. This piece of data was just interesting to me since it showed that overall, at an all India level, the ratio in rural India looks better. how does the migration theory explain this fact, am not able to understand that…? it seems likely to me that these single men in the city come back to the villages and take their wives to the city, and so on…?
and more importantly, nowhere at all (rural or urban) is the sex ratio FAVORABLE to women…
I meant the second point as a possible explanation of the fact that the adult sex ratio tends to be less unfavourable to women. My gut feel is to go with the first, but the second also needs to be considered.
Ravi, the sex ratio is not favorable to women anywhere in India. it is unfavorable. 957/932 (rural/urban) women per thousand men.
That is why I said *less unfavourable”. If you start with an unfavourable sex ratio in the first place, and men die at a higher rate than women do once they reach adulthood, you might end with a less unfavourable sex ratio for women.
Anyway, the reason I mentioned that possiblity is that I dimly remembered reading that in war ravaged Afghanistan, the sex ratio for adults was very unfavourable to men because of all those deaths by fighting. Checking now I find that it shows that kind of pattern, but only for those above 65 (95 men for every 100 women) but for the ages 15-65, it is 105 men for 100 women. I can’t find a breakup by age groups.
(Also, the sex ratio used to be favourable to women in Kerala and Manipur. How is it now?)
How do you plan to stop this ?
By putting men and his parents/sisters randomly into Ghettos ?
Society considers men as disposable whereas it considers women as grown up children.
So who will not prefer a bunch of disposable creatures at home who can even look after them in old age ?