According to the UNFPA’s State of the World Population 2020 report, the number of “missing women” has more than doubled over the past 50 years – from 61 million in 1970 to a cumulative 142.6 million in 2020.“Missing females” are women missing from the population at given dates due to the cumulative effect of postnatal and prenatal sex selection in the past.

• One in three girls missing globally due to sex selection, both pre- and post-natal, is from India — 46 million out of the total 142 million.
• The report cites a 2014 study to state that India has the highest rate of excess female deaths at 13.5 per 1,000 female births or one in nine deaths of females below the age of 5 due to postnatal sex selection.
• The same study shows that in Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan excess female mortality of girls below 5 years of age was under 3 per cent.

THE WAY OUT: IMPLICATIONS AND SUGGESTIONS

Surpluses of men will destabilize society and   negative social consequences—it may lead to more rape, child marriage of girls, domestic violence and greater perceptions of sexual harassment.

INDIA’S LEGISLATIVE MEASURES

Pre-natal gender determination sex selection practice is banned in India since 1994, under Pre-conception and Prenatal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act. The above Act aims at prevention of sex-selective abortion; prohibits medical professionals from revealing the future sex of a fetus to a pregnant woman.

The Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act, 1971 (MTP) do not, under any circumstance, allow sex determination tests to be undertaken with the intent to terminate the life of a fetus developing in the mother’s womb, unless there are other absolute indications for termination of the pregnancy as specified in the MTP Act of 1971. Also the government    launched Beti Bachao, Beti Padhao campaign in January 2015. It also launched several conditional cash transfer schemes such as Balika Samriddhi Yojana and Dhanalakshmi Scheme.

WHAT NEED TO BE DONE

1. Increased the status of women; more female employment in the labor market, new laws and policies to improve gender equality and awareness-raising campaigns through the media.
2. Short-term measures such as providing incentives for families with daughters may help to increase the perceived value of girls, supplementing with  longer-term efforts to change deep-rooted thinking and attitudes .
3. Legal restrictions in isolation from broader social policies and other measures to address deep seated social norms and effect behaviour change may be ineffective. These include laws for more equitable patterns of inheritance, and measures such as direct subsidies at the time of a girl’s birth, scholarship programmes, gender-based school quotas or financial incentives, or pension programmes for families with girls only.
4. Methodologies should also be developed to evaluate the impact of legislative changes, new policies, incentive programmes, and awareness and media efforts. Documenting and analysing the reasons for the success or failure of specific and collective interventions must be part of this process and be given high priority and sufficient resources.
5. All programmes that aim to encourage behaviour change, it will be essential to complement national-level activities with mutually reinforcing activities at the local level in order to fully engage communities.                     

   Sex ratio is used to describe the number of females per 1000 of males.

   Child Sex Ratio is defined as the number of females per thousand males in the age group 0–6 years in a human population.