ABSTRACT
The sex composition of the human population is one of the basic demographic characteristics which is extremely vital for any meaningful demographic analysis. Sex ratios in a population are an important source of data, which can illuminate socio-cultural processes and problems related to gender (Miller 1983). When the provisional result of the latest census was released in April 2001, the most hotly discussed issue was not the size and the growth of India’s population or the literacy rate, but its sex composition (Bhat 2002b). Newspaper headlines and media panellists decried how prosperity was marginalising women and aggressive family-planning campaigns were proliferating female foeticide or infanticide.
