By Chand Tulal Mazumdar
Abstract
The gender imbalance caused by a skewed female-to-male sex ratio remains a persistent problem in India despite rapid economic development in recent times. The low child sex ratio results from both excess female infant mortality—due to malnutrition and neglect—and from sex-selective abortions, the roots of which lie in a strong cultural preference for sons over daughters. Although the government banned prenatal sex determination techniques in 1994, many feel that the policy has been ineffective due to inadequate enforcement. Apart from the ban, the government introduced other schemes and campaigns at both national and state levels that focused on changing parental perception and behavior toward daughters. Using two rounds of District Level Household Survey (DLHS) data, this study assesses the impact of Haryana’s Ladli scheme—a conditional cash transfer scheme that provides incentive to parents for having a second daughter—on the likelihood of having daughters using a difference-in-differences approach with Punjab as a comparison state. The findings suggest that while the likelihood of having a daughter increased in Haryana compared with Punjab in the post-policy period, the effect is not statistically significant. However, restricting the sample to border districts in Haryana and Punjab shows some significant results.
Chand Tulal Mazumdar completed her Master of Public Policy from Georgetown University in 2012 and finished her thesis under the guidance of Thomas Wei, PhD. She is currently a Research Associate at the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL), where she works on a project that uses randomized evaluation to assess the impact of a performance-based incentive scheme on tuberculosis health workers in Northern India.