Déséquilibre entre les sexes en Inde (document en anglais)

India is now one of the biggest developing countries worldwide. Its growth performance is spectacular in recent years. However, in spite of the economic growth, the country still has far way to go on the social side.

In this article, I will mainly present the gender imbalance existing in India.

Sex ratio is a good source to reflect the equality of men and women at a given period of time. The natural sex ratio is 105 boys born for every 100 girls, but in India, the number is 100 females per106.4 males in 2011. This ratio varies from region to region. Haryana has the lowest sex ratio of 100 females per 114 males.

There are many reasons for this gender imbalance in the population. Traditionally, Indians like boys. They think boys can send the souls of their parents to the heaven after their deaths. Another important factor is the dowry system. When the couple decided to get married, the girl’s family would have to prepare a large sum of dowry. Otherwise, the man’s family might torture the girl. Therefore, people consider that the boy is regarded as “asset” since he will stay with his family and contributes financially to the family, while the girl is considered as “liability”.

For these reasons, the sex-selective abortion is very common in India. The government has published some laws to ban the use of technology to determine the sex of the baby before the birth, but the result is not satisfactory. People can know the baby’s sex by corrupting the doctors or having the medical examination in some unregistered private clinics. Some clinics even published some ads to encourage the couples to abort the girl: “500 rupees today to save 50000 rupees tomorrow”. Statistics show that during the past 30 years, 12 millions girls were “missing” due to the sex-selective abortions.

With men outnumbering women, many social problems appear.

- Many young men cannot get married nor have children because of the scarcity of women.

- Crime and unrest increase in areas with more men than women: rapes, women/girl trafficking, etc.

- In some areas, men buy or rent wives from the black market. There are even people who share their wives with their friends or relatives.

- Those who cannot afford to buy or rent the wife will go look for the prostitutes. The result of this is from 1990 to 2010, the number of prostitutes has doubled in India.

- Usually, women who are forced to get married cannot be properly treated in their husband’s family. They are compelled to do many household chores every day. Moreover, family violence is common in this kind of cases.

- The shortage of adult females increases the prevalence of child marriage.

Indian government has taken some measures to change the gender imbalance. However, since some traditional ideas have been deeply rooted among people, it is very difficult to solve the problem. I think the government might can pay more attention to the education as well as protection for women, do more efforts to instill more advanced ideas.

...