India has more women than men for the first time on record.
The fifth edition of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) has now confirmed signs of a demographic shift in India.
India now has 1,020 women for every 1000 men, is not getting any younger, and no longer faces the threat of a population explosion. The report indicates that India is no longer called a land of ”missing women” as stated by the Nobel prize winner economist Amartya Sen in a 1990 essay in the New York Review of Books.
India now has more women than men. There are 1,020 women for every 1,000 men as per the report released by the fifth round of the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS). It has been released by the Union health ministry on Wednesday November 24th.
NFHS is the most comprehensive database on a host of socioeconomic and health indicators with a focus on women – NFHS-5 covered 720,000 women and just above 100,000 men – and its basic results can be compared to the previous four rounds which were conducted in 1992-93, 1998-99, 2005-06 and 2015-16.
The NFHS surveys are smaller but are conducted at the district level and are a pointer to the future.
Only the decadal census is considered the official marker of population trends in India and have a wider surveillance programme.
However, sex ratio at birth for children born in the last five years only improved from 919 per 1,000 males in 2015-16 to 929 per 1,000, underscoring that boys, on average, continued to have better odds of survival than girls.
As per the report most union territories had more women than men.
Gujarat, Maharashtra, Arunachal Pradesh, Haryana, Madhya Pradesh, Punjab and Union territories such as Jammu & Kashmir, Chandigarh, Delhi, Andaman and Nicobar islands, Dadra and Nagar Haveli, and Ladakh are the states where the population of women are fewer than the men.
However all of these states and union Territories had improved a lot in the increase of womens population.
“The improved sex ratio and sex ratio at birth is also a significant achievement; even though the real picture will emerge from the census, we can say for now looking at the results that our measures for women empowerment have steered us in the right direction ,” said Vikas Sheel, additional secretary, Union ministry of health and family welfare and mission director, National Health Mission.
According to the findings, child nutrition indicators showed a slight improvement at all-India level as stunting declined from 38 per cent to 36 per cent, wasting from 21 per cent to 19 per cent and underweight from 36 per cent to 32 percent.
The government is yet to release the full database of NFHS-5. Detailed all-India report and reports for the states and Union territories which were canvassed in the second round and the unit level data had not been released at the time of writing this story. This means that a disaggregated analysis by caste, wealth levels and religion, etc, is not possible at the moment.
