The Hindu       08.09.2014 

2-child norm for local bodies skews sex ratio

India’s attempt at a China-type population control policy appears to have had drastic but unintended consequences. Laws enacted by State governments in the late 1990s and 2000s restricting political eligibility to candidates with two or less children did reduce family sizes in those States, but severely affected the sex ratio, a new research has found.

Over the period, 11 Indian States passed laws disqualifying persons with more than two children from contesting panchayat elections. Some States like Bihar, Gujarat and Uttarakhand enacted such laws later, while Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh repealed their laws after 2005. Uttarakhand and Bihar implemented the law only for municipal elections.

In a working paper, economists S. Anukriti from Boston College and Abhishek Chakravarty of the University of Essex looked at seven States — Rajasthan, Haryana, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra — in which such laws were in effect between 1992 and 2005.

Using data from various rounds of National Family Health Survey (NFHS) and District-Level Household Survey (DLHS), the researchers found that there was a marked decline in the number of women in the general population reporting third births exactly one year after the new policy was announced; the first year was a “grace period” in all of the State laws.

This decline was relative to that State’s own history of decline in fertility as well as other States which didn’t enact such laws.