Introduction

More than three decades ago, when Amartya Sen flagged the problem of missing women (Sen 1990), India's overall sex ratio and child sex ratio (CSR) were 927 and 945, respectively. Since then sex-determination technology that ‘permits couples to resort to sex selection’ has played a major role in skewing sex ratio amidst ‘declining fertility and entrenched son preference’ (Guilmoto 2009: 524). Son preference also contributes to the neglect of the health of the girl child, which further aggravates the skewed sex ratio by increasing the girl child mortality. The union government introduced the Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994, to prohibit the misuse of diagnostic techniques to identify the sex of the foetus. Yet, in 2001, ‘the child sex ratio (CSR) first dropped below that of the overall sex ratio’, and the problem spread beyond the north-western states (John 2011: 11). A decade later, the overall sex ratio increased to 943, even as the CSR further dropped to 918. The CSR has, in fact, steadily declined from 976 to 918 between 1961 and 2011, even as the overall sex ratio fluctuated between 927 and 943 (Figure 3.1).

Very low CSRs were first reported in some of the north-western states, but Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) was not among them. However, defying conventional wisdom, the state, which was above the all-India CSR until 2001, reported a sharp decline in 2011 that placed it among the worst-performing states in the country (Figure 3.2). This development has not received adequate attention in academic and public debates, possibly because insurgency-hit J&K is widely seen as an exceptional state, and, in any case, it accounts for about 1 per cent of the country's population and less than 1 per cent of the national income. In other words, J&K does not have a large impact on national figures and is not among the major states that are indispensable for national (policy) debates and academic analyses.

Researchers and policymakers have uncritically used the results of the 2011 census for J&K. In fact, census officials, too, did not critically examine the data (see, for instance, Government of India [GoI] 2011d: 81–84). The joint director of census operations (Jt DCO) observed that ‘child sex ratio was equally worrisome as it has dropped by 100 points from 963 in 1981 to 863 in 2011.