National Plan of Action to Improve Child Sex Ratio

Smt. Krishna Tirath, Minister for Women and Child Development held consultations to formulate a National Plan of Action to Improve the Child Sex Ratio. The Minister said that declining Child Sex Ratio (CSR), in its present nature and scale, is a cause of urgency and concern. She stated that child sex ratio is a powerful indicator of the social response and attitude towards the girl child. The Minister stated that while certain States have consistently shown low number of women population like Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, Jammu & Kashmir, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra. There are as many as 119 districts with CSR lower than the already low average on 914.

The districts with lowest CSR are mainly located in Northern and Western States of the country. What is even more alarming, Smt. Tirath pointed out was that the practice of prenatal sex selection spreads, the sex ratio at birth in urban areas remains far worse 898 for than for rural areas where it was 907 in 2008-10. They were of the view that there exists a grave danger of gender imbalance due to this. The spread of declining CSR in the rural areas is mainly due to easy availability of cheap sex determination machines in these areas and poor implementation of the PCPNDT Act.

0 comments: