Revision summary
Patriliny and patrilocal marriage make sons the continuing line. Daughters are culturally other houses, which dowry prices. Honour and ritual son-need reinforce elimination. Better-off groups with clinics often show sharp skew. Matriliny and stronger land rights for women correlate with less bias.
Model answer
Copper italics in this answer — like this — are the key facts. Each one is unpacked in the Facts & figures rail.
Introduction
A skewed sex ratio is not a mysterious shortage of girls. It is the social preference for sons written into kinship, honour, and the labour of care. Technology made the preference countable; it did not invent it.
Body
Kinship and property
- Patriliny and patrilocal marriage, as in Karve’s northern zone, make the son the line and the daughter a guest.
- Dube’s Seed and Earth idiom treats the girl as a field that will belong to another house, so her birth is a loss.
- Dowry inflates that loss as a future payment.
Honour and religion-as-practice
- Gotra and jati continuity, not only poverty, drive elimination where ultrasounds arrived first among the better-off.
- Some communities show less skew where women’s land rights or different descent, including matriliny pockets, weaken the seed line.
Other socio-cultural loads
- Ritual need for sons, widow stigma, and violence against women who bear daughters.
- The new middle class can combine consumption with sex selection, so skew is not only a village custom.
Note
- Law bans detection of sex. Culture still ranks the child.
Flow diagram
flowchart TD P[Patriliny Seed and Earth] --> SON[Son preference] D[Dowry honour] --> SON SON --> SK[Skewed sex ratio] T[Selection technology] --> SK
Conclusion
Socio-cultural factors behind India’s skewed sex ratio are patriliny, dowry, honour, and the devaluation of daughters as outsiders to the line. Prosperity and clinics have often sharpened, not erased, that culture.
Quick related
Students also ask
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Rising 'ethnocentricism' is leading to conflict in our society. Assess this statement with appropriate reasons
Next question on this syllabus topic (2021 · Q7(b)). View answer →
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Is poverty the main cause?
Poverty matters. Skew among prosperous north-western groups shows culture and property as drivers.
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Will more education fix the ratio?
Education helps when it changes kinship value, not when it only raises the cost of dowry.
Same topic · past papers
UPSC has asked this before
These previous-year questions sit on the same topic. Open one to practise the earlier ask.
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2026 · Q2(b) · Sociology GS 2 · 20 marks
Examine how Indian Nationalism was a result of 'Akhand Bharat'/Indian Subcontinent's socio-cultural and political consciousness
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