LEADER ARTICLE
India's Missing Girls: Chhota Parivar, Dukhi Parivar

Ever wondered what happened to the family planning triangle and the ‘hum do, hamare do’ slogan, that together so popularised the small family norm through the 60s and 70s? The slogan and the red triangle typically formed the backdrop for India’s so-called modern family — a couple with two children, one male and one female.
With the stress slowly shifting from family planning to family welfare to reproductive and child health, the red triangle era has faded from memory.The new 90s vision has it that the small family is not an end in itself, but only the end product of a process of socio-economic development. This changed perspective stems from the understanding that historically population was the outcome of socio-economic factors and not the other way around. In other words, smaller families do not raise living standards; better living standards lower fertility levels and reduce family sizes. Thus has evolved the correlation between fertility and such development factors as the woman’s health, her social status, education and quality of life.
However, in India, as in China and Korea, the process has taken a skewed turn. Fertility levels have dropped, in many places accompanied by economic betterment, but entirely without the social enlightenment that must come with it. The outcome is today’s small family: Superficially progressive -— the red triangle model? -— but with all the biases of the past intact. What happens when the ‘son preference’ trait combines with an artificially imposed small family norm? The inevitable consequence is the destruction of the female foetus.
Indeed, population experts are discovering to their utter dismay that India’s family planning programme, with its ‘one boy-one girl’ emphasis, may well have contributed to the low child sex ratios (number of females to males in age group 0-6) revealed by the latest census. Worse, statistics show an almost direct connection between affluence, small family size and sex selective abortions. Here’s how it goes. Poorer families are generally larger, and hence will have children of both sexes. In an affluent two-child family, on the other hand, if the first is a girl, then the pressure to produce a boy is that much more. Result: The targeted elimination of all subsequent female foetuses till a male child is finally conceived.
Though a declining child sex ratio was a feature found in all states, including worryingly in Kerala, the picture was somewhat more comforting in the south and the north-east, suggesting a greater attitudinal sensitivity towards the girl child in these regions. In the case of the north-east and Kerala, this fact is clearly owed to the historically superior place accorded to women there.
Look at the census figures. The child sex ratio has declined across the country, from 945 girls per 1,000 boys in 1991 to 927 girls per 1,000 boys in 2001. But more incredibly, the decline shows up the most in two categories: Urban areas and the higher income groups. The urban child sex ratio is the worst in the comparatively better-off states of Punjab (789); Haryana (809); Gujarat (827); Chandigarh (844); Himachal Pradesh (858) and Delhi (866). In contrast, it is the best in the comparatively poorer states of Arunachal Pradesh (981); Manipur (980); Meghalaya (964); Mizoram (961) and Andhra Pradesh (958). Within every state, the ratio improves visibly in the rural areas, reaching the highest levels in the tribal areas.
There are more dramatic results when the child sex ratio is measured against prosperity. The 55th round of the National Sample Survey (1999-2000) classified the population of states into four groups according to average monthly per capita expenditure in rupees: 0-425; 425-665; 665-1,120 and 1,120 and above. In Punjab, the child sex ratio in the first category was 1,167 and the last 646. In other words, an astonishing 521 missing girls between the worse-off and better-off classes. In the case of Haryana, the ratio was even more startling: 1,567 in the first category and 541 in the last. Or more than a thousand missing girls between the two classes!
Of course, this might not warrant the conclusion that the poor are always more gender sensitive. But as communities become more affluent, they adopt previously unknown practices like dowry, gain access to technology and resort more and more to female foeticide. C P Sujaya of the Centre for Women’s Deve-lopment Studies points to the prevalence of infanticide among the Kallars of Tamil Nadu, an agricultural labour community, who upon growing prosperous with the green revolution, adopted dowry with all its attendant evils.
The relation between affluence, small family and low sex ratio is a disturbing trend that bodes ill for the future. Akhila Shivdas of CFAR (Centre for Advocacy and Research) feels that by and large Indian families are not reconciled to the two-child norm, which remains a measure more of social status than social enlightenment. Otherwise, they should have happily accepted two daughters.
Ms Sujaya is worried by the official reluctance, despite two census throwing up alarming figures, to admit the role of India’s family planning programme in skewing the gender balance. If earlier, the government propagated the small family unthinkingly, without a social campaign to raise the value of the girl child, today it deliberately prefers to separate the connected issues of population policy and foeticide.
As living standards rise and Indian ferti- lity levels drop, it almost seems destined that more and more girl children will go missing.