I am not him, but maybe this↓ will be his opinion.
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India baby girl deaths 'increase'
There is a cultural preference for male children in India
The number of girls born and surviving in India has hit an all-time low compared with boys, ActionAid says.
A report by the UK charity says increasing numbers of female foetuses were being aborted and baby girls deliberately neglected and left to die.
In one site in the Punjab state, there are just 300 girls to every 1,000 boys among higher caste families, it says.
ActionAid says India faces a "bleak" future if it does not end its practice of cultural preference for boys.
Girls 'condemned'
ActionAid teamed up with Canada's International Development Research Centre (IDRC) to produce the Disappearing Daughters report.
More than 6,000 households in sites across five states in north-western India were interviewed and statistical comparisons were made with national census date.
The real horror of the situation is that for women avoiding having daughters is a rational choice
Laura Turquet, ActionAid
Under "normal" circumstances, there should be about 950 girls for every 1,000 boys, the charity said.
But it said that in three of the five sites, that number was below 800.
In four of the five sites surveyed, the proportion of girls to boys had declined since a 2001 census, the report said.
The research also found that ratios of girls to boys were declining fastest in comparatively prosperous urban areas.
ActionAid suggested the increasing use of ultrasound technology may be a factor in the trend.
The document says that Indian woman are put under intense pressure to produce sons, in a culture that predominantly views girls as a burden rather than an asset.
It says many families now use ultrasound scans and abort female foetuses, despite the existence of the 1994 law banning gender selection and selective abortion.
The charity also blames other illegal practices - such as allowing the umbilical cord to become infected - for the growing gender imbalance.
"The real horror of the situation is that, for women, avoiding having daughters is a rational choice. But for wider society it's creating an appalling and desperate state of affairs," Laura Turquet, women's rights policy official at ActionAid said.
"In the long term, cultural attitudes need to change. India must address economic and social barriers including property rights, marriage dowries and gender roles that condemn girls before they are even born.
"If we don't act now the future looks bleak," Ms Turquet said.
Some 10 million female foetuses have been aborted in India in the past 20 years, the British medical journal the Lancet has said.
BBC NEWS | South Asia | India baby girl deaths 'increase'
I asked your opinion about the missing girls in china.
China grapples with legacy of its ‘missing girls’
Disturbing demographic imbalance spurs drive to change age-old practices
A Chinese father carries his sleeping child at a park in Shanghai
Claro Cortes Iv / REUTERS
Eric Baculinao
Beijing Bureau Chief
ENCARTA
CHINA: Maps, facts and figures
By Eric Baculinao
Beijing Bureau Chief
NBC News
updated 8:56 a.m. ET Sept. 14, 2004
BEIJING - China is asking where all the girls have gone.
And the sobering answer is that this vast nation, now the world's fastest-growing economy, is confronting a self-perpetuated demographic disaster that some experts describe as "gendercide" -- the phenomenom caused by millions of families resorting to abortion and infanticide to make sure their one child was a boy.
The age-old bias for boys, combined with China's draconian one-child policy imposed since 1980, has produced what Gu Baochang, a leading Chinese expert on family planning, described as "the largest, the highest, and the longest" gender imbalance in the world.
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Ancient practice
For centuries, Chinese families without sons feared poverty and neglect. The male offspring represented continuity of lineage and protection in old age.
The traditional thinking is best described in the ancient "Book of Songs" (1000-700 B.C.):
"When a son is born,
Let him sleep on the bed,
Clothe him with fine clothes,
And give him jade to play...
When a daughter is born,
Let her sleep on the ground,
Wrap her in common wrappings,
And give broken tiles to play..."
After the Communists took power in 1949, Mao Zedong rejected traditional Malthusian arguments that population growth would eventually outrun food supply, and firmly regarded China's huge population as an asset, then with an annual birth rate of 3.7 percent. Without a state-mandated birth control program, China's sex ratio in the 60's and 70's remained normal.
Then in the early '80s, China began enforcing an ambitious demographic engineering policy to limit families to one-child, as part of its strategy to fast-track economic modernization. The policy resulted in a slashed annual birth rate of 1.29 percent by 2002, or the prevention of some 300 million births, and the current population of close to 1.3 billion.
‘Missing girls’
From a relatively normal ratio of 108.5 boys to 100 girls in the early 80s, the male surplus progressively rose to 111 in 1990, 116 in 2000, and is now is close to 120 boys for each 100 girls at the present time, according to a Chinese think-tank report.
The shortage of women is creating a "huge societal issue,” warned U.N. resident coordinator Khalid Malik earlier this year.
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Along with HIV/AIDS and environmental degradation, he said it was one of the three biggest challenges facing China.
"In eight to 10 years, we will have something like 40 to 60 million missing women," he said, adding that it will have "enormous implications" for China's prostitution industry and human trafficking.
China's own population experts have been warning for years about the looming gender crisis.
"The loss of female births due to illegal prenatal sex determination and sex-selective abortions and female infanticide will affect the true sex ratio at birth and at young ages, creating an unbalanced population sex structure in the future and resulting in potentially serious social problems," argued Peking University's chief demographer back in 1993.
Prenatal sex selection
The abortion of female fetuses and infanticide was aided by the spread of cheap and portable ultra-sound scanners in the 1980's. Illegal mobile scanning and backstreet hospitals can provide a sex scan for as little as $50, according to one report.
"Prenatal sex selection was probably the primary cause, if not the sole cause, for the continuous rise of the sex ratio at birth," said population expert Prof. Chu Junhong.
A slew of reports have confirmed the disturbing demographic trend.
* In a 2002 survey conducted in a central China village, more than 300 of the 820 women had abortions and more than a third of them admitted they were trying to select their baby's sex.
* According to a report by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the vast majority of aborted fetuses, more than 70 percent, were female, citing the abortion of up to 750,000 female fetuses in China in 1999.
* A report by Zhang Qing, population researcher of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the gender imbalance is "statistically related to the high death rate of female babies, with female death rate at age zero in the city or rural areas consistently higher than male baby death rate." Only seven of China's 29 provinces are within the world's average sex ratio. Zhang Qing's report cited eight "disaster provinces" from North to South China, where there were 26 to 38 percent more boys than girls.
* In the last census in 2000, there were nearly 19 million boys more than girls in the 0-15 age group. "We have to act now or the problem will become very serious," said Peking University sociologist Prof. Xia Xueluan. He cited the need to strengthen social welfare system in the countryside to weaken the traditional preference for boys.
Gravity of imbalance beginning to be felt
The hint of "serious" problems ahead can be seen in the increasing cases of human trafficking as bachelors try to "purchase" their wives.
China's police have freed more than 42,000 kidnapped women and children from 2001 to 2003.
The vast army of surplus males could pose a threat to China's stability, argued two Western scholars. Valerie M. Hudson and Andrea M. Den Boer, who recently wrote a book on the "Security Implications of Asia's Surplus Male Population," cited two rebellions in disproportionately male areas in Manchu Dynasty China.
