Gender Imbalance: Trends, Pattern and its Impact on West Bengal

Sex is an easily identifiable characteristic of an individual. Sex composition of a population refers to the balance between male and female in any population. It can be expressed either in the form of proportion of a particular sex in the population or as a ratio between the population of two sexes. As is obvious, the first one gives the number of males per hundred females or number of males per thousand females in the population and is the most widely used measure of sex ratio the world over. On the country the second provides the number of females per hundred males or number of females per thousand males in the population. The sex composition by age group especially the 0-6 years is vital for studying the demographic trends of child population. Though, the overall sex ratio has improved to 947 as compared to 934 in 2001, the child (0-6 years) sex ratio, i.e. the number of girl children per 1,000 male children has shown an unabated decline since 1971. It has declined from 1010 in 2001 to 950 in 2011. The decreasing child sex ratio will have a cascading effect on population over a period of time leading to diminishing sex ratio in the state. Sex ratio is an important determinant for assessing composition of population, quality of life, levels of development and level of human resources, level of participation in different economic activities of males or females of a particular region. The preview of the present study is to assess the trends, spatial pattern of overall and child sex ratio and find out the association of sex ratio and also there impact in the society of West Bengal (India).