Define Patriarchy. How does it impact the overall entitlement of a girl child in India? (2014)
India’s Sample Registration System put the sex ratio at birth at 917 girls per 1,000 boys for 2021-23. No biological process produces that number; a social one does. Patriarchy is therefore best defined here as a system of unequal valuation — an order assigning differential worth by sex before a person can act, and distributing survival, food, schooling and freedom accordingly. Its impact on a girl child is not one disadvantage but a cumulative life-course, each stage narrowing the next.
Before birth: the missing girls
Son preference has an economic grammar. A son is ritual heir, old-age security and the one who keeps land in the lineage; a daughter is paraya dhan and a dowry liability. Amartya Sen’s “More Than 100 Million Women Are Missing” (1990) gave the deficit its name. Tulsi Patel’s work on reproduction shows how new technologies were absorbed into old preferences: ultrasound did not create son preference, it made it efficient. The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act, 1994 bans sex determination, but convictions remain few, and NFHS-5 recorded a sex ratio at birth of 929 against Census 2011’s child sex ratio of 919 — worst, tellingly, in the prosperous north-west.
Infancy: survival and the health gradient
Discrimination after birth is quieter: later health-seeking, shorter breastfeeding, poorer feeding. Research on NFHS-5 data finds full immunisation of girls aged 12-23 months at 70.8 per cent in households expressing son preference against 76.9 per cent where none is expressed, operating mainly through fewer antenatal visits, lower wealth and less maternal schooling. Excess female child mortality is the aggregate of such small decisions.
Childhood: schooling against chores
- Enrolment is no longer the binding constraint. UDISE+ 2024-25 records girls’ gross enrolment ratio above boys’ at every stage — 80.2 against 77.3 at secondary and 60.9 against 56.2 at higher secondary.
- Retention and time are. Only 58.4 per cent of the age group is enrolled at higher secondary at all, and ASER 2024 found the share of girls aged 15-16 out of school edging up to 8.1 per cent.
- Time Use Survey data show girls aged 15-17 spending 163 minutes a day on unpaid domestic services against 89 for boys. Sibling care is the commonest reason a girl’s study time disappears without her leaving school.
Adolescence: marriage, mobility and the body
NFHS-6 (2023-24) found 20.1 per cent of women aged 20-24 married before 18, down from 23.3 in NFHS-5. Early marriage ends schooling, moves a girl to a household where she has no fallback, and begins childbearing before growth is complete — which is why anaemia and low body mass cluster in this group. Leela Dube identified the mechanism in ordinary discipline over food, space, dress and mobility; Uma Chakravarti identified the stake, since a girl’s sexuality carries the caste’s boundary.
What has changed, and what has not
Beti Bachao Beti Padhao (2015) and Sukanya Samriddhi coincide with health-system data showing the sex ratio at birth rising from 918 in 2014-15 to 930 in 2023-24, and girls now out-perform boys in most board examinations. Bina Agarwal’s caution still applies: entitlement means effective command, and a girl who tops her board but inherits no land and relinquishes her coparcenary share has gained capability without assets.
Conclusion
Patriarchy’s effect on the girl child is a shifting frontier, not a fixed condition. Entitlements the state can deliver directly — enrolment, immunisation, institutional birth — have moved substantially. Those requiring changes to kinship and property — survival at conception, freedom of movement, land — have moved least. That the sharpest deficits persist in India’s richest agricultural districts settles the argument: this is a structure, not a shortage.