THE declining sex ratio, more particularly juvenile or child sex ratio (CSR), is a major challenge for modern India. In this respect, the results of Census 2001 were quite shocking. The provisional results of Census 2011, released a few months ago, revealed an equally shocking, if not worse, picture.

Academics like Mattias Larsen have, to their credit, thrown light on the kind of intellectual integrity that is needed at the level of policy- and decision-making to address the problem, despite the unglamorous nature of the subject. (People in India seem more preoccupied with corruption scandals and cricket than with the declining CSR.)

Larsen's Vulnerable Daughters in India is dedicated aptly to the “unborn girls” and is an attempt to uncover what he calls the structural reasons for the decline. A researcher at the School of Global Studies, Peace and Development Research, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, Larsen is a specialist in economic sociology of development. His approach is dominantly sociological and so is much of the theoretical underpinning of his argument. The declining CSR, he says, is a result of an ongoing process of societal change.

Much of the book is devoted to understanding the nature of relations, kinship between people and, more importantly, how the cultural preference for sons fits into the changing socio-economic context with a disconcerting ease. The family is the unit where the decision-making happens; so he keeps his focus on the family even as he tries to understand the impact of larger societal changes.

Through his fieldwork in select districts of Himachal Pradesh, Larsen reveals what people already know but have failed to emphasise adequately – that the sharp decline actually began roughly 15 years ago and also coincided with the period of economic liberalisation. The already subordinate position of women suffered further with the advent of the cash economy and less dependence on the economic role played by women in agriculture. This argument is not new, and neither does Larsen appropriate it as his own.

His field study in villages of Kullu district shows that the changes in the economy – from subsistence agriculture to a highly developed cash economy – brought about substantial changes in the lives of women. Earlier, women used to spend a good part of their time doing agricultural and household work. In the changed circumstances, men now looked after the orchards and negotiated the rates of hiring labour, while the women lost the income from agricultural activities that they earlier had control over, though there was now more social mobility and also freedom from the drudgery of agricultural work. Though not a tradition, dowry, almost all respondents agreed, had become a serious problem. More dowry meant higher status in the cash economy.

There could well be a link between the declining status of women and the relegation of women to domestic duties. Work outside the home might have been demanding, but it was also emancipatory. The birth of a son is expected to ensure that the property remains with the family, while a daughter is expected to be committed more to her in-laws rather than her parents. These notions, predominant in much of northern India, are expressed in the interviews that Larsen conducted.

Larsen finds that there has been a loosening of relations between sons and parents. While parents expect to be looked after in their old age by their sons, the actual assurance is not always so strong. What if the state took on the responsibility of looking after the old and the infirm, instead of leaving it to their children? Would son preference still be so strong? Larsen does not explore that angle. He uses purely cultural tools to understand the phenomenon. But the respondents in his interviews clearly indicate things were different 15 years ago. Larsen does not lay excessive emphasis on sex determination tests, which, he argues, are the outcome of the changes that have taken place in the last one and a half decades. He attempts to bring out the contradictions among people on their approach to daughters. For instance, he argues that his respondents educated their daughters but felt that daughters could never be sons. He also indicates a perception shared by those who are familiar with gender issues in India that even though daughters are educated, the kind of education they receive and to what extent are problematic questions.

Even in the metropolises, it is not unusual for lower- and middle-class families to send their sons to “private” schools and their daughters to “government” schools. Larsen writes: “Despite the abundance of accounts of how daughters are seen at least as positively as sons, in the end they are nevertheless perceived as being liabilities. Daughters are being systematically excluded from people's family-building strategies, yet these clearly positive attitudes about daughters show that the exclusion is not based on a negative perception of daughters on a personal level, but in a structural sense.” The individual is then condemned to be a victim of the structure, rather than being an agent of change of the very structure created by human beings themselves. The fatality of the argument is somewhat disconcerting.

Larsen says: “Daughters are assigned a role that is mainly defined in negative terms, of what they are not. The most important and obvious is that daughters are not sons.” Intergenerational interdependence, he says, has grown, with parents now more dependent on their children. The Census shows declining fertility rates, but it is also a fact that the costs of raising children and the levels of dowy demanded have gone up. Larsen makes dowry a central argument in explaining the bias against the girl child. He also cites religious practices and caste prejudices to emphasise why sons are preferred to daughters. For instance, a married daughter can never belong to her parents' household because she assumes the gotra of her husband's family at the time of her marriage. Son preference, Larsen reminds us repeatedly, is a cultural factor, which operates at a level quite different from other factors.

Larsen could have attempted to compare the various degrees of son preference in the country, examining the situation in the northern States and in some of the north-eastern or southern States such as Kerala to study the material factors that have influenced feudal and patriarchal thoughts on the male child. Dowry is very much prevalent in Kerala too, but that does not lead to the girl child being unwanted in the way that she is in parts of northern India. His own field studies in Himachal Pradesh show that the girl child had a better deal in communities where women were organised into some kind of a collective and had greater influence over their personal situations.

Larsen maintains that there is a complex relationship between social and economic aspects. But he does not explore this arena further, preferring rather to rely on the “cultural argument” offered by his respondents on more than one occasion. The “structural” and the “cultural” keep on overlapping and repeatedly resurface without leading to much sociological clarity.

The issue to be noted, which Larsen somewhat ignores, is that the structure is not a constant; it keeps changing and it changes according to the broader economic relations on the ground, which in turn shape and decide the nature of social relations. The ability of individuals to negotiate within these changing contexts and the political will, perhaps, to enforce certain norms, can effectively alter the superstructure that is perceived to be invincible and indestructible.

“Indeed, what respondents frequently described were clear contradictions between changes and continuities as they had experienced them,” writes Larsen. It is in the transformations that have occurred over the last 15 years, the changes and the continuities, that issues of culture have to be located. Larsen takes refuge behind sociological constructs to explain the inexplicable: why girl children are not wanted in Indian society. He writes that “a structural analysis based on identifying internal relations and necessary conditions will help in explaining its existence but is unlikely to provide for answers in relation to its origin, and therefore, also not to why it is changing. This requires causal analysis.

A holistic approach, in which both structure and agency is related to its context facilitates analysis of such a problem. From a holistic perspective, reality is viewed as a process of change driven by the dynamic interaction between parts and whole.” The sheer notion of son preference, he says, presupposes reciprocal relations between people and sets of rules.

“To try to argue for an analysis of the actions involved in going through sex determination tests and sex-selective abortions in isolation of such a context of relations is logically inconsistent. In fact, such a closed conception, which in the final analysis rests on an understanding of preferences and values as endogenously given would be outright offensive,” he argues. Yet, he, too, seems to be talking of set notions of son preference and mindsets.

There can be no disagreement with him on his thesis that “the context dependent nature of the problem is linked to its structural aspects”. The question is: is it enough to stop at that? Socio-economic changes have put a strain on relationships, more so in the last 15 years, with skewed notions of individual success and economic growth pervading minds. To use Larsen's words, “the conditions of an intergenerational contract have strained”, and with little or no state support for those experiencing these sweeping changes, the situation for women and girl children could not have taken a turn but for the worse.