1st Time Ever, India Has More Women Than Men; This Is #1 Health Concern For Indian Children

India can no longer be called a country of “missing women”!

According to the recent National Family Health Survey (NFHS) fifth edition survey, India today has 1,020 women for every 1000 men, is not getting any younger, and is no longer a threat of a population explosion.

National Family Health Survey Findings

The NFHS surveys are typically smaller, but they are performed at the district level and serve as a foreshadowing of what is to come.

The Union health ministry issued the summary findings of the fifth round of the National Family and Health Survey (NFHS) on November 24, which included all three radical findings.

The figures show that India is no longer a country of “missing women,” a term used by Nobel Prize winner economist Amartya Sen in a 1990 essay published in the New York Review of Books. In India at the time, there were 927 women for every 1,000 men.

The ratio was 1000:1000 in NFHS-3, which was conducted in 2005-06; it was 991:1000 in NFHS-4, which was conducted in 2015-16. The sex ratio is skewed in favour of women for the first time in either NFHS or Census.

 The full database of NFHS-5 has yet to be released by the government.

Main Objective Of Successive Rounds Of The NFHS

According to the ministry, the fundamental goal of subsequent rounds of the NFHS is to produce trustworthy and comparative statistics on health and family welfare, as well as other emerging challenges.

Between 2019 and 2021, NFHS-5 was done in two waves, covering 650,000 households in 707 districts across the country. Arunachal Pradesh, Chandigarh, Chhattisgarh, Haryana, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, NCT of Delhi, Odisha, Puducherry, Punjab, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh, and Uttarakhand were among the states and union territories surveyed in Phase-II.