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India has a history of discrimination against girls and women through its customs of female infanticide, dowry killings, and ritual sati immolation of widows [29]. It has recorded pronounced and continuing fertility declines, and its past two decades of very rapid economic growth have been attended by increasing domestic diffusion of new technologies of every sort. With this as a backdrop, India would seem poised as a likely battlefield in the new global war against baby girls. Sure enough, both SRBs and child sex ratios have risen markedly for the world’s second most populous country since the early 1990s. According to India’s National Family Health Surveys (NFHS I-III), India’s nationwide SRB rose from around 105 in 1979/1992 to 109 for 2000/2006; more recently the country’s National Sample Survey placed the SRB for 2004/2006 at 112 [30]. According to India’s population censuses, the nationwide sex ratio for children under 7 years of age rose from 105 in 1991 to 109 in 2011 [31]. Geographically, India’s gender imbalances are most extreme in India’s northwest. In the states of Haryana and Punjab, the 0-6 sex ratio is now close 120, or even above 120, while in Delhi, India’s capital, the sex ratio for children under 7 is currently a reported 115 (fig. 5, 6). Socioeconomically, SRBs and child sex ratios in India today correlate positively - not negatively - with education, income, and urbanization. Like the aforementioned countries with high SRBs, sex selective abortion is illegal in India.

Fig. 5. India: reported sex ratios for children ages 0-6 years by state, 2001 versus 2011. Source: Census of India [31].