Daughter Deficit in India

New book by Sharada Srinivasan, former student of ISS (PhD in 2006), and now Assistant Professor in International Development Studies at York University, Toronto, Canada

ISS alumna Dr Sharada Srinivasan has published a new book on

Daughter Deficit, Sex Selection in Tamil Nadu

This book is about girls who are denied the right to live or to be born in India, and it asks why and how such a situation has come about. Daughter elimination in the form of sex selection, female infanticide and neglect is not an aberration or an idiosyncrasy—it accounts for a large proportion of missing girls in India, measured by the sex ratio imbalance in the 0–6 age group. The author examines this disturbing fact from the context of women’s lives to unravel the causes of daughter elimination, and the mechanisms which create and sustain an environment in which this is imaginable.

An interview with the author can be found in The Hindu.