SPATIAL CHERENCES OF THE CILDRENS' SEX RATIO TRANSITION IN INDIA, BASED ON THE LAST CENSUS

Abstract

Amidst the recent demographic characteristics more and more attention is paid to the year by year increasing surplus of boys of certain countries – among them India – due to the upsetting of their children and young aged population's natural sex ratio. On the strength of a hypothesis, which is not confirmed with complete certainty till now, this phenomenon can be interpreted as one of the phases of a specific transitional process. According to that, in any community motivated by socio-economic necessities to have male descendants, the spread of prenatal diagnostic techniques making possible to determine the sex of foetuses and the increase of solvent demand for them result in the reduction of the number of female births at first, emerging on account of artificial interventions. Later, in parallel with the gradual expansion of the change in social attitude and the weakening of traditional family structure, boy preference starts to lose its strength, and as a consequence the equalization of sex ratio differences which extremely high can be commences, as well.

During this demographic process mentioned above, various regions of the country and their populations respectively, cover different ways in time following each other with some phase delay. Although there is no doubt about that they are predominantly in the period, which corresponding with the pan-Indian trend, can be characterized by increasing surplus of male births, it also seems sure that certain social groups have already gone over to the next stage of the transition, so a diminishing process of the exorbitant divergences in sex ratios at birth has begun among them. The authors present some spatial features of the transitional course appearing in childhood sex ratio deviation on the basis of district level data issuing from the 2001 and 2011 censuses.