Correcting The Skew... Among suggestions made for checking prenatal sex determination are:     * Police presence outside suspect ultrasound clinics and hospitals     * An online complaint forum to allow people to inform on erring clinics     * Mapping of districts, identification of problem regions and analysis of data to determine causative factors     * Tracking sex ratio through data collection at birth, so that real-time data is available for corrective measures *** The news of the...

Patriarchal societies are part of the problem of altered sex ratios, female infanticide and foeticide. This needs to be acknowledged and changed. India's sex ratio, among children aged 0-6 years, is alarming. The ratio has declined from 976 females (for every 1000 males) in 1961 to 914 in 2011. Every national census has documented a decline in the ratio, signalling a ubiquitous trend. Preliminary data from the 2011 census have recorded...

India’s population of 1.2 billion, according to the 2011 decennial census, is growing at the century’s slowest rate of 17.6 per cent — four percentage points lower than in the previous decade. India is approaching, but has not yet reached, the replacement level. This means India’s population will stabilise somewhere between 1.5 billion and 1.6 billion by 2030, making it the world’s most populous country. It is hard to discern...

The Union health ministry registered only 107 cases of female feticide under Section 315 and 316 of IPC in 2010. This is an abysmally low figure in a country which scientists believe has seen over 10 million female lives lost to abortion and sex selection in the past two decades. A few years ago, an Indo-Canadian scientist had reported in the Lancet that pre-natal selection and selective abortion was causing a...

The population of India’s commercial capital is growing very slowly in the suburbs while it is shrinking in the old city, the preliminary census data on Maharashtra released on Friday shows. Meanwhile, the population of adjoining Thane district has grown explosively at 35.9% between 2001 and 2011, as expensive real estate in the city has pushed people to satellite towns such as Kalyan and Vashi in this district. The shift in people...