Extremely Detailed Distribution of Child Sex Ratio in India: A Geographical Analysis of 595,496 Census Villages

Geographic variation in sex ratio has been assessed across Indian states/union territories and districts, but not at the local level. For the first time we present the multi-level geographies of child sex ratio (CSR) using the 2011 Census data, with a special focus on villages. Here we show that 96% of the total variation in CSR was attributed to villages. While the predicted CSR for all India was 97.1 girls per 100 boys, it ranged from 28.4 to 165.7 for 95% of the villages. Of the 595,496 villages, 39% were ‘boy’ villages (≤88 girls per 100 boys) and another 12% had deficits in girls (88.1-93.0), while 38% had CSR above the normal range (>98). The magnitude of local variation in CSR was heterogeneous across states and districts. Our findings imply that identifying villages with severely skewed CSR for prioritization and investigating ‘normal’ villages to understand local factors that drive balanced sex ratio can better inform policies and programmes to be designed and implemented with greater precision.