ABSTRACT
One feature of India’s demographic profile that has attracted demographers’ attention for many decades has been its masculine sex ratio. This interest received a marked impetus when India’s 2001 census indicated that child sex ratios (CSR, the sex ratio of children aged 0-6) had become significantly more masculine since the 1991 census. CSRs had been becoming more masculine throughout India since the 1970s and at an accelerating pace since the mid-1980s. Fertility has been declining throughout India, with its onset later and slower in the north and north-west than in the south. Similarly, processes associated with sex bias are not spatially random (Guilmoto and Attané 2007).
