Reforms over 20 years to India’s discriminatory and anti-women inheritance laws, which could have helped raise women’s socio-economic status, appear to have failed to mitigate society’s long-held preference for sons, according to a new study.
Instead, such change of law between 1970 to 1990 has inadvertently led to increased female foeticide and higher female infant-mortality rates, finds the 2018 study that analysed families’ desires for a second child if the first child was a girl.
The findings are supported by the Economic Survey 2017-18, which found an estimated 63 million women--roughly the population of the United Kingdom--‘missing’ in India.
The study finds that