Girls make a comeback - What India and China are doing about the women shortage

For decades, many families in India and China did not want daughters. Girls were often aborted, killed as infants, abandoned, or sold. But in recent years, things have started to change.

Political decisions aimed at curbing rapid population growth in India and China, together with a widespread preference for boys for economic reasons, have led to a situation where both countries now have more men than women. Again and again, the preference for sons over daughters caused families to resort to radical measures, ranging from sex-selective abortions to infanticide, the abandonment of girls, and, in China, the sale of girls after birth. As early as 1990, Indian economist Amartya Sen, who would later win the Nobel Prize in Economics, warned that more than 100 million women were "missing" in the developing world, and especially in India and China, in the ratio to men. Today, many men in China and India are unable to find wives due to the shortage of women.

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