Emerging Trends in Sex Composition in Gujarat:Its Causes and Consequences

Abstract

Sex composition of the human population is one of the basic demographic characteristics, which is extremely vital for any meaningful demographic analysis. Indian Census has the tradition of bringing out disaggregated information by sex on various aspects of population. The first and foremost is the simple count of males and females. Changes in sex composition largely reflect the underlying socio-economic and cultural patterns of a society in different ways. Sex ratio defined here as the number of females per 1000 males in the population, is an important social indicator to measure the extent of prevailing equity between males and females in a society at a given point of time.
The sex ratio affects the social and economic conditions in a variety of ways. The marital status and marriage ability, the strength of man-power, availability of different types of labour force, the death rate and vital statistics, the school going population, the extent of employment of women outside the home, the status of women in the community and the many other social conditions are more or less directly related to the sex ratio of population.
The sex ratio of Indian population has always been a topical interest for the demographers, social scientists, women’s groups, research scholars and various planners and policy makers. This paper is an attempt to study the ratio percentage of female population in Gujarat over the male population and also have studied basic reasons and consequences of declining sex-ratio in India and find out the remedial measures to tackle this problem.