240,000 girls a year die in India due to gender discrimination, excluding those aborted for being female

By Dilip -
Almost a quarter of a million girls under five die in India every year due to neglect resulting from society’s preference for sons, a gender discrimination study has found. The figure does not include those aborted simply for being female, researchers wrote in the Lancet medical journal. “Gender-based discrimination towards girls doesn’t simply prevent them from being born, it may also precipitate the death of those who are born,” said co-author Christophe Guilmoto..

India: 40 million gender imbalance due murder of babies 

“Gender equity is not only about rights to education, employment or political representation, it is also about care, vaccination, and nutrition of girls, and ultimately survival.” Guilmoto and a team used population data from 46 countries to calculate how many infant girls would have died in a society where there was no discrimination impact, and how many died in reality. The difference, about 19 deaths out of every 1,000 girls born between 2000 and 2005, was ascribed to the effects of gender bias. This amounted to about 239,000 deaths a year. “Around 22% of the overall mortality burden of females under five (in India) is therefore due to gender bias,” the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) a research institute based in Austria, said in a statement.

The problem was most pronounced in northern India, the researchers found, with states Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Rajasthan, and Madhya Pradesh, accounting for two-thirds of the excess deaths.
Hardest hit were poor, rural, farming regions with low education levels, high population densities, and high birth rates. Co-author Nandita Saikia from the IIASA said: “As the regional estimates of excess deaths of girls demonstrate, any intervention to reduce the discrimination against girls in food and healthcare allocation should therefore target in priority regions ... where poverty, low social development, and patriarchal institutions persist and investments [in] girls are limited.”

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/may/15/india-girls-die-gender-discrimination-study

Some more readings:
When it comes to honour killing, India is neck and neck with Pakistan, literally. Every year at least 1000 women get killed in the name of honour in India, almost the same as in Pakistan. Every fifth woman killed in the name of honour in the world is Indian. If not for honour, it is quite likely that Baloch could have been killed before birth just because of her gender. In western India, states like Haryana (879), Punjab (895), Rajasthan (928) and Gujarat (919) that lie on the India-Pakistan border, the sex ratio is a damning condemnation of how girls are considered a perishable commodity, just as Baloch was. (Pakistan's sex ratio - 1:1.05 - is better than India's.)

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