SKEWED SEX RATIO

Subject: Health

Context: C Rangarajan (former Chairman, Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council) and J K Satia  argue that there is an urgent need to reach young people both for reproductive health education and services as well as to cultivate gender equity norms.

Concept:

• The sex ratio is the ratio of males to females in a total population.
• The skewed sex ratio could upset the gains from a falling fertility rate which is estimated to be TFR 2.2(Total Fertility Rate) in 2018.
• However it will not result in stabilisation of population. This is because of the population momentum effect, a result of more people entering the reproductive age group of 15-49 years due to the past high-level of fertility.
• That is why the UN Population Division has estimated that India’s population would possibly peak at 161 crore around 2061.
• The SRS(Sample Registration System) reports show that sex ratio at birth in India, measured as the number of females per 1,000 males, declined marginally from 906 in 2011 to 899 in 2018.
• This is a cause for concern because this adverse ratio results in a gross imbalance in the number of men and women and its inevitable impact on marriage systems as well as other harms to women.
• Urgent reforms are needed to reduce the effect of population momentum and accelerate progress towards reaching a more normal sex-ratio at birth.