One in three girls missing globally due to sex selection, both pre- and post-natal, is from India, i.e. 46 million out of the total 142 million.
India has the highest rate of excess female deaths at 13.5 per 1,000 female births or one in nine deaths of females below the age of 5 due to postnatal sex selection.
In India, around 460,000 girls went missing at birth, which means they were not born due to sex-selection biases, each year between 2013 and 2017.
India (40%) along with China (50%) account for around 90% of the estimated 1.2 million girls lost annually to female foeticide.
One in nine females below the age of 5 die due to postnatal sex selection.
It tends to be higher among wealthy families, but percolates down to lower-income families over time, as sex selection technologies become more accessible and affordable.
The skewed ratio causes the number of prospective grooms to outnumber prospective brides, which further results in human trafficking for marriage as well as child marriages.
However, the positive news is according to the report, advances in India have contributed to a decline in child marriages in South Asia. This corroborates the NFHS data which had said that child marriage in India fell from 47% in 2005-’06 to 26.8% in 2015-’16.
