More scenes from our "Brave New World."
Thanks to ultrasound and abortion, India faces a gender imbalance.
When you take a closer look at the statistics, you find some surprising and scary figures – the ratio of female children to males born actually declined here over the last 10 years – from 933 females for every thousand males in the 2001 census, to just 914 in 2011. The combination of cheap portable ultrasound technology and a decades-old preference for male babies — who are seen as breadwinners — has enabled sex-selective abortions and made worse female infanticide. In a place as wide and as vast as India, these are things that are hard to control, no matter how illegal.
And:
A village elder told me that he estimated some 70% of the men there were unmarried. There were a variety of historical causes – lack of industrialization, an unwillingness to marry outside caste and regional lines – and most recently, a rapidly declining supply of brides. There are over 350 unmarried men over 35 – this a remarkable figure for rural India, where people marry very young – some as early as 15. There are hundreds more under 35, but there are so many that no one can confirm the numbers.
According to The Economist:
Without intervention, just a few more boys would be born than girls. If you compare the number of girls actually born to the number that would have been born had a normal sex ratio prevailed, then 600,000 Indian girls go missing every year. This is less distorted than the sex ratio in China, but whereas China’s ratio has stabilised, India’s is widening, and has been for decades. Sex selection is now invading parts of the country that used not to practise it.
What that means is that in India there will be tens of millions of unmarried men in the population. Given the historic relationship between unmarried men in a population and crime and social unrest, that can't be good news.
Apparently,
it is a problem that runs throughout Asia:
In a presentation at the Fourth Asia-Pacific Conference on Reproductive and Sexual Health and Rights in India, the French demographer Christophe Guilmoto, warned that future deficits of adult women would affect the stability of the entire marriage system and lead to social unrest where men were likely to be violent against women.
There are 2.1 billion men and 1.9 billion women across Asia. Some Asian countries have between 5 and 20 per cent more men than women.
In a study of sex selection in China, India, Nepal and Vietnam, Dr Guilmoto estimated that by 2050, the number of men would outweigh that of women by 33 million in India and by 25 million in China - even if current rates of gender imbalance declined.
This could lead to a large number of men having to migrate to find partners or to an increase in sex trafficking, said Dr Guilmoto.
There is also an interesting religious/sociological angle:
Among the Christians and the Muslims, the sex ratio is relatively higher. There is no such social practice of female foeticide and infanticide among them. This is one of the reasons of no decline in the size of their population but the population of Hindus has declined. This decline was 25.1 per cent during 1981-91 and 20.3 per cent during 1991-2001 with the relative difference of 4.8 per cent decline among them. The Christian population remains almost constant but the Muslim population in India increased by 34.5 per cent during 1981-91 and 36.0 per cent during 1991 2001 with the relative difference of 1.5 per cent increase among the Muslims as against 4.8 per cent decline in Hindu population. This decline may be contributed to the alarming decline in the gender ratio among the Hindus. We observe that the sex ratio among the Hindus, and also among the Jains and the Sikhs, who are also counted as Hindus is the lowest as compared to other religious communities (Table 8).
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