Asia: Heirs and Spares
In the Indian farming village of Medina, 200km from Delhi, the narrow lanes are clogged with high-end sport utility vehicles, reflecting the prosperity brought by rising land values to this traditional community. In their mud-floored homes, residents display flatscreen televisions, refrigerators and other modern conveniences.
But Medina’s families are also using their new wealth to acquire a scarce local commodity: teenage girls to act as wives for the community’s growing cohorts of unmarried men.
A shortage of young women arising from decades of aggressive use of sex-selective abortion in northern breadbasket states – including Haryana, where Medina is located – is prompting families to turn to the impoverished east to secure females. Communities once fussy about caste are now prepared to buy young girls who do not even speak their language, though such unions are usually without formal weddings. “At first, people were ashamed of bringing wives from outside, but now they don’t care – they pay and they bring,” says Ram Niwas, 68.
“A woman is a child-bearing machine. Her only work is to bear children and cook.” Three years ago, Mr Niwas paid Rs80,000 to buy Suman, now 19, from Assam state for his 35-year-old son. While some girls are cast out after delivering and weaning a boy, Suman still lives in the household following the birth of her own, though says she is beaten when she displeases her in-laws. For Mr Niwas it has been a good deal. “A water buffalo is still more expensive than one of these girls,” he says.
Officials in Asia’s fast-growing economies are less sanguine. India, China and also Vietnam are becoming increasingly alarmed by a shortage of girls that defies assumptions that gender imbalance will fall as wealth rises. They point to the social and political consequences of rising numbers of unmarried men and the potential impact on economic growth.
Prostitution and forced marriage are rising in both India and China. India has recorded an upsurge of violent crime against women, including gang rape and honour killing, while in China there has been a spate of kidnappings of school-age girls taken to be reared as future brides. Meanwhile security experts warn the glut of unmarried young men is increasing tensions in societies already in ferment from rapid economic change.
In the long term, a shortage of girls contributes to “the criminalisation of society”, says G.D.Bakshi of Vivekananda International Foundation, a Delhi security think-tank. “It will aggravate aggressive tendencies – whether they manifest in internal conflict, armed rebellions or you try and externalise conflict.”
In China, the sex ratio among newborns is about 120 boys for every 100 girls, compared with the ratio of 105 boys per 100 girls that is considered normal. So concerned are authorities that last month Li Bin, minister of the national population and family planning commission, told state-owned Xinhua news agency: “One of the important tasks in the [recently adopted] 12th five-year plan is to ease the unbalanced gender ratio.”
Delhi, in turn, was jolted by census data showing the number of boys under the age of seven rose from 107.9 per 100 girls in 2001 to 109.4 in 2011, even as the economy grew at unprecedented speed. The influential National Advisory Council headed by Sonia Gandhi, leader of the ruling Congress party, has set up a committee to discuss how to reverse the trend.
Communist-ruled Vietnam shows a similar trend of rising affluence and increasing imbalance. After a decade of blistering growth, it reported 110.5 boys born for every 100 girls in 2009, up from a more “normal” ratio of 106.2 boys in 2000. Nguyen Thien Nhan, a deputy prime minister, has warned that 3m men may be unable to find wives by 2030, and Hanoi is grappling for a response.
Traditional preferences for sons are deep-rooted in Asia, particularly in agricultural communities. Boys help till the fields and are responsible for caring for their elderly parents. Girls require dowries and, once married, are expected to be loyal to a husband’s family and are therefore unable to support their own parents in their dotage.
Confounding long-held expectations, the preference appears to persist even as development creates new opportunities for women, potentially reducing long-held perceptions that daughters are solely economic liabilities and altering the relative costs of raising sons and daughters. “You see this rising affluence, and high standards of living, but in terms of social values, and social thinking, a large part remains extremely primitive,” says A.K. Shiva Kumar, a member of India’s NAC. “The social pressure for sons is phenomenally high, particularly among the middle class. The symbols of modernity surround them, but you don’t have any change in thinking.”
With the spread of ultrasound machines, what families in Haryana casually call “the wipeout” has become much easier. “The intensity of daughter aversion may reduce, but parents’ ability to act on that aversion is much higher now,” says Ena Singh of the UN Population Fund in Delhi.
India, China and Vietnam have all banned sex-selective abortions and prohibit medics from disclosing a child’s gender before birth. But enforcement is erratic, with few prosecutions for violations. Chinese and Indian doctors in urban areas may follow the rules but clinics elsewhere operate with few controls. In Vietnam, the sex-selective abortions is seen as a routine medical service.
In China, “villagers who have even a little money or good connections will be able to find out the gender before birth”, says Cheng Zhu, whose six-year-old daughter was kidnapped six years ago, probably to serve as a child bride, as she waited to be picked up from school.
