Ten daughters later, that long-awaited moment: The 11th child, male. Married for 19 years, the 37-year-old woman and her husband got their long cherished wish on January 3 when she delivered a baby boy in what doctors at Jind district, Haryana where he was born, described as a high risk delivery.
“We were keen that there should be a son and some of my elder daughters also wished to have a brother,” the father Sanjay Kumar told news agency PTI. Kumar who works as a daily wage laborer said all his daughters are in school, the eldest in class 12. He described his family situation as “god’s will”.
The Jind case is admittedly extreme and thankfully rare. The data is not.
The natural sex ratio at birth is about 105 male births per 100 female births, or 950 female babies for every 1,000 male babies. But in India, it was 928 in 2023, according to the civil registration system. This is actually an improvement over previous years when it was 903 in 2007 and just 877 in 2016.
The geographic spread is uneven, as can be seen in the top five states.
Punjab and Haryana no longer make it to the bottom. Haryana was once the worst performer with 834 girls for 1,000 boys according to the 2011 Census, which is why the Beti Bachao Beti Padhao campaign was launched from the state in 2015. In 2025, according to a reply in Parliament, it had improved to 923.
Worryingly, southern states which once had good sex ratios at birth, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh, have witnessed a decline in sex ratio between 2007 and 2023. In Karnataka it fell from 1,004 to 947; in Andhra Pradesh from 974 to 931. Even Kerala has seen a slide from 971 in 2022 to 967 in 2023.
Over 15% of those surveyed in the latest round of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) in 2019-2021 said they wanted more sons than daughters. But the numbers are down, dramatically from the 33% who said they wanted more sons in an earlier NFHS round of 1998–99.
But the aversion for daughters also declines.
In 2000, The Economist analyzed1.7 million girls were ‘missing’. Through pre-natal sex selection made widely available via cheap ultrasounds there were 1.7 million fewer girls than the natural biological sex ratio. or even infanticide, fewer girls that should have been born were not allowed to. By 2025 that number is likely to have fallen to 200,000, estimates The Economist.
This decline is being witnessed even in Asia. In South Korea, sex ratio at birth is now at normal biological levels of around 105, down from 116 per 100 girls in 1990.
In China, it has fallen from a peak of 118 in the mid-2000s to 111 in 2023-24. And in India, it has dropped from 110 in 2010 to 107 nationally.
Traditionally, it’s the sons who perform funerary rites. It’s the sons who carry forward the family name. And it’s the sons who are supposed to support the parents in old age. Daughters marry and take on the responsibilities, including that of unpaid care work, of their marital families. Their links with their natal families remains tenuous at best.
Daughters also meant significant expenses through dowry, a practice that remains rampant. Furthermore, there are safety concerns. In a country that still places family honor on the so-called virtue of its daughters, having a daughter itself means the additional burden of keeping her safe from harm, outside and inside the home.
With fertility rates falling to around 2.1, family sizes are now smaller. This hasn’t shifted the preference for at least one son, but has instead increased the pressure on women to produce one. Some demographers call this “birth order distortion”—gender neutrality for the first child, but a definite preference for a boy if the first-born is a daughter. And if the first two are daughters, then a “last chance” effort at producing a son.
Medical technology, including IVF, has made sex selection easier although, points out Dr Parikshit Tank who runs an IVF practice in Mumbai, “Most clinics do not entertain such requests as it is neither ethical nor legal.”
A gradual shift
Change is slow, but it is coming. A 2019 survey of 30,000 adults by Pew Research found 94% of Indians said it was very important to have at least one son. Yet, 90% also said it was very important to have at least one daughter.
In India, said Poonam Muttreja, executive director, Population Foundation of India, “Son preference is not on the decline and India will continue to have a preference for sons because of social norms. But the aversion for daughters is definitely less.”
It’s daughters who help their mothers shoulder the responsibility of housework at home. And it is increasingly adult daughters who take responsibility for their aging parents.
Despite the social restrictions on their movements and the cultural expectation that it is their job to contribute to housework, girls have now achieved parity in school. Even in higher education, women have achieved near parity of 48% with men in 2021-22.
In staunchly patriarchal states like Haryana, parents are encouraging daughters to take up sport, including wrestling. The cricket team that lifted the World Cup trophy was perhaps the finest showing of women’s possibility, trained and encouraged in many cases by their parents.
Legal frameworks prohibit sex determination before birth, but ultimately it is the aspiration and achievement of the girls themselves that have made them valuable to their families and to society. Daughters might not have become the aspirational gender for many parents, but for a growing number, they have proven to be indispensable.
