Sonia Malhotra, 42, says she never felt unwanted growing up, but remembers the subtle differences in the way her parents treated their three daughters compared to the two sons.
“My sisters and I were not allowed to pursue sports or studies to the extent we wanted. Our parents never explicitly talked about their decision, but they stopped having children after my youngest brother was born. They had had one boy, followed by three girls and then a son,” she says.
While the Economic Survey, tabled in Parliament on January 29, says 21 million girls in India were “unwanted”, families covered by the statistic say the situation is not that easy to explain.
Coming up with the first such estimate of “notionally unwanted girls”, the survey calculates the difference between the actual sex ratio and the ideal sex ratio for each birth order. “While active sex selection via fetal abortions is widely prevalent, son preference can also manifest itself in a subtler form,” the survey says, leading to fewer resources for girls.
By looking at the sex ratio of the last child (SRLC), the survey is able to estimate if there is a preference for a male child. If there was no preference, then the number of boys and girls born, irrespective of the birth order, would be around the same.
Delhi, which ranks second after Haryana in terms of sex ratio at birth (with around 1,191 males per 1,000 females), has an SRLC tilted heavily towards males. For every 1,000 females, there are around 1,750 males when it comes to SRLC.
Radha (name changed), a mother of four, says the decision to have a third child after two daughters was economic. “My husband and I are daily wage earners and our son is like insurance and social security,” she says.
For 24-year-old Sameer (name changed), growing up with two sisters 16 and 12 years older than him, the question of whether his parents were waiting to have a boy did come up in his mind. “Now I think that it wasn’t really planned,” he said.
