NEW DELHI, July 22: Indian parents’ fear of their inability to find a suitable groom for their daughters along with the societal pressure to pay huge sum of dowry adds to the feeling of the girl child being a ‘burden’, says a UN report released today.
“The unintended consequences of contemporary social processes, when combined with parental fears of the unattached sexuality of adult daughters in a context of a highly competitive and differentiated marriage market, are compounding the sense of burden represented by the birth of a daughter.
“She now requires many more years at home with higher investments in nutrition, health and education… Sons, on the other hand, embody a range of ritual and economic roles. If the current climate of economic volatility and masculine anomie makes them often fall short of expectations, nonetheless at least one is essential for the future of the family. It is this conjuncture that is producing the falling Child Sex Ratio (CSR),” according to the report ‘Sex Ratios and Gender Biased Sex Selection: History, Debates and Future Directions’.
The report explores the various aspects which compounds the problem of declining child sex ratio that India is grappling with despite being one of the fastest growing economies in the world.
“The CSRs have fallen most precipitously during a period of unprecedented economic growth. It has emanated from northern and northwestern India, regions which may be characterized as being in the wake of the Green Revolution and whose levels of prosperity therefore require more careful calibration,” says the report.
The report also highlights the analysis of sex selection in urban locations in Delhi and Punjab by Tulsi Patel, a professor of Sociology who elaborated on the ‘mindset’ of ‘young parents in modernizing India’.
“According to Patel such parents are not simply opposed to daughters as such. Rather, they wish to have two children of which at least one should be a son”, the report said.
She goes on to discuss the particular case of a woman who already had two daughters and who used the help of a friend, and money supplied by the husband to get the sex determination test done, which was then followed by an abortion when the test revealed a female foetus.
“Patel uses such individual cases to emphasize the burden on women after they have given birth to a daughter, leading to their own vested interest to go in for sex selective abortions repeatedly until a son is announced,” cites the report.
The sharply declining child sex ratio in India has reached emergency proportions and urgent action must be taken to alleviate this crisis, the report said.
“The deteriorating ratio from 976 girls to 1000 boys in 1961, to 927 girls in 2001, and to 918 girls in 2011, demonstrates that the economic and social progress in the country has had minimum bearing on the status of women and daughters in our society,” said Lakshmi Puri, Deputy Executive Director of UN Women, Assistant Secretary General of the UN.
The report highlights how the deteriorating status of women in recent decades, spurred by modes of economic development and parallel transformations have also been responsible to the declining CSR and emphasises upon creating a women friendly climate, through better policies, programmes, laws and spaces. (PTI)
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