The new Aamir Khan show 'Satyamev Jayate' has once again ignited the debate on the female infanticide in the country, especially in the north, which is also called the Hindi belt. The opening episode of the show had mothers from different parts of rural and urban India talking about the pressure and the problems they faced for delivering a girl child. "If Partition was the silent holocaust, foeticide is our silent genocide — having eliminated over a million bodies in the past few years," says noted sociologist Shiv Visvanathan.
A recent study published in the medical journal Lancet also had some alarming findings. Selective abortion led to 7.1 million fewer girls than boys up to the age of 6. It is a gender gap that has widened by more than a million in a decade. The study also finds that in the last 30 years, an estimated 4 to 12 million girls were aborted because of their sex. The study claims that rich, educated Indian parents may be the worst offenders, choosing to abort a second daughter.
The sex ratio in India, according to the Census of 2011, stands at 940 which is a marginal increase from 933 in 2001. Sex ratio is expressed as the number of women per thousand men in a given population at a given time. Following is a list of the states and Union Territories of India ranked in order of their sex ratio. The data given below is according to the Census of India (2001 and 2011). Kerala remains at the top with the highest sex ratio while Haryana has the lowest sex ratio among the states.
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