Indian population swings from more males during childhood to more females during old age

The 2011 census data, released just recently, gives the population for each succeeding age year from age 0 to 100 plus.  Quite a few persons have not indicated their age and these are about 0.4 percent in the population.  The age distribution for various states has been given by place of residence (rural and urban) and by sex as below.

 

Sex Ratios by Age and by Residence

Age Intervals	Total	Rural	Urban
0	910	912	905
1-6	920	925	906
7-15	911	917	896
16-60	949	957	934
61-70	1020	1034	987
70-80	1028	1028	1028
80-90	1107	1072	1182
90-99	1124	1098	1181
100 plus	1094	1106	1069
Not Stated	892	900	878
Senior Citizens	1022	1030	1005
Total	943	949	929

Usually, discrimination against girls is measured by the child sex ratio, that is, the difference in the populations of the two sexes from 0-6. Among infants less than a year old, boys outnumber girls by about 9.55 lakh. But by six years, the difference increases to nearly 7 million (69.9 lakh). This is also described as a sex ratio of about 919 girls per 1,000 boys. The story doesn’t end here. There is an appalling drop in girls’ population after that.

Census 2011 data has revealed a huge difference in the number of girls and boys in the under-15 age group. The difference in the population of boys and girls aged seven to 15 years is nearly 11 million (1.1 crore). That’s a sex ratio of 911:1,000 for this age group.

While female foeticide is responsible for the skewed sex ratio at birth, the difference among living children is driven by gross neglect of the girl child as well as girls are also given much more domestic work.   Limited resources in families, as found in a very large number of poor families in India, sets up the context for this fatal discrimination. If resources are limited, sons get preferential treatment over daughters. All measures for special incentives for the girl child — cash transfers, nutritional supplements, family incentives — have failed to make a dent in the prevailing mentality of son-preference and discrimination against girl children.

In case of all India, it has been observed that with each passing year, the number of young girls surviving drops with very little exception till the persons become senior citizens.  For the persons not stating their age, one may safely assume that these persons would mostly belong to higher age groups, say above 60 years. As from the above table on Sex ratio, the sex ratios are against females for ages below 60 years and it is other way round for the age groups above 60 years.  Only for urban senior citizens up to 70 years, males are more than females.  Such phenomenon can be due to better medical facilities in urban areas than in rural areas.  It could be well understood that males comparatively have lower life spans than females and thus senior citizens have sex ratio more than thousand.  Should parents love to have more sons than daughters?  Because of this, parents should either be in favor of daughters or at least be indifferent.