Indian woes

France 24, of all places, has an article about the continuing problem of sex selecting abortion in India.  It's startling how entrenched it is, despite successive governments trying to stop it:

Over the past three months, not a single girl was born in 132 villages in the northern Indian state of Uttrakhand, according to local authorities. An investigation was launched over the weekend after official data revealed that of the 216 children born in 132 villages in the Uttarkashi district, not one was female, according to Asian News International (ANI). In 16 of the 132 villages, now marked as a “red zone”, no female births were recorded over the past six months.

Quantifying India’s skewered gender ratio is a depressing business and it keeps getting worse. The 2011 Census found the world’s largest democracy had 919 female children for every 1,000 male children, down from 927 in 2001. 

The country’s preference for boys results in fewer female births due to sex selective abortions as well as excessive female deaths due to neglect or maltreatment. Together, they account for what statisticians call women “missing” from national populations. In 2017-2018, the Indian economic survey found 63 million Indian women were “missing” and an additional 21 million were “unwanted", resulting in lower nutritional and education levels. 

They've tried to ban dowries, but everyone ignores it, it seems:

While wedding costs in India are customarily borne by the bride’s family, rising consumerism has sparked increasingly lavish, long-drawn-out ceremonies. Media coverage of extravagant ceremonies hosted by a growing section of “super-rich” adds aspirational pressure on bridal families struggling to cope with wedding costs. 

The economics of traditional Indian marriages then are brutally simple: the family of the bride enriches the family of the groom. In low income and caste groups this means the family of the groom can impoverish the bride’s family. And that, experts say, accounts for India’s entrenched preference for sons and declining value of women.

“The dowry that must be paid to marry off a daughter encourages parents to prefer sons, because in this case, they do not pay for the weddings and instead receive dowries and gifts,” explained Bénédicte Manier, a journalist and author of “Made in India”. “These dowry-related transactions are worth billions of rupees each year in India, it’s an economy by itself, growing with a new middle class. Not surprisingly, this social category, which has high dowry rates, also has the highest birth sex selection rates.”

I also would not have guessed that the arranged marriage rate was still so high:

Arranged marriages account for an estimated 90 percent of Indian marriages, almost all of them within societally prescribed caste and community groups. The lack of choice is largely unquestioned and enthusiastically promoted in popular culture such as films and TV series.

The sex ratio leads to some horrible situations for adult women too:

A skewered sex ratio, far from increasing the value of a woman’s life, puts her at graver risk, say experts. Manier explains that it sparks a “strong disruption of the marriage market” resulting in “many men struggling to find women of their age”. This, she warns, results in high celibacy rates in some areas. “In the long term, some 30 million men will remain without a wife. This situation also leads to trafficking of young women from poor families. Some are even bought by several men who "share" or sell them several times in a row.”

In some of the worst affected northern Indian states, the practice of buying and selling wives is so prevalent that vulnerable women are resigned to the fact that they will be sold on to a next husband after delivering a son.

What a society...