WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

50
P. AROKIASAMY
that fertility decline has led to exacerbated parental discrimination -
both prenatal and postnatal.
The massive female deficit in India is therefore the outcome of
both the large volume of excess female child mortality (quantum effect
of son preference) and the recent rise in sex ratio at birth (intensity
effect of son preference) due to sex-selective abortion and differential
stopping behaviour (DSB). An extensive literature documents evidence
of DSB as a factor contributing to higher sex ratio at birth, even in the
absence of sex-selective abortion (McClelland, 1979; Coombs et al.,
1979; Clark, 2000). 2
The patriarchal intra-familial economic structure coupled with the
perceived cultural and economic utility of boys over girls, known to be
based on religious or caste-based institutional norms, have been suggested
as the original determining factors of degree of son preference
and the inferior status of women across the regions (see Dyson and
Moore, 1983; Miller, 1981; Das Gupta, 1987; Kishor, 1993). Son preference
is in the interest of the family lineage, whose continuity depends
on sons alone while daughters are considered to be transient members
of the kin group.
In short, sons are perceived to provide support to their parents,
both before and after marriage, while daughters move on to their
husband’s families and provide very little economic and emotional
support. Daughters are considered as a net drain on parental resources
in patrilineal and patrilocal communities (Dasgupta, 2000). More importantly,
in the Hindu religious tradition, sons are needed for the
cremation of deceased parents in order to provide a safe passage from
this world to the next (Arnold et al., 1998).
In India, a large volume of evidence of son preference has been
documented in terms of desired and actual sex composition of children,
the ratio of the desired number of sons over daughters averaging
1.5 (NFHS, 1992-93). In the northern and western states the ratio rises
between 1.5 and 1.91. In contrast, in the southern states, the ratio
drops down to the range of 1.0 - 1.2, indicating an only marginal preference
for sons. Parental preference for sons is also revealed by the
common finding that the decision to determine child bearing is
strongly related to the couple’s number of surviving sons. This raises
2 The stopping rule behaviour of couples depends not only on the magnitude of son
preference but also on its intensity (see McClelland, 1979; Coombs et al, 1979). Clark
(2000), in her paper based on NFHS-1 data, concluded that differential stopping
behaviour affects both the size of the family and the sex composition of the children
ever born, leading to a negative relationship between proportion of sons and family
size.