Why are there more Indian men than women?

I'm not against abortion - I'm putting this up to highlight the effect that female infanticide has had on the Indian population.

India aborts 500,000 female fetuses a year: study
Monday, January 9, 2006

Up to 10 million female fetuses have been selectively aborted in India since 1976, according to a Canadian-led study released Monday in a British medical journal.

The study in the Lancet found fewer daughters were born to couples still presumed to be trying for a boy, said Dr. Prabhat Jha, director of the Centre for Global Health Research at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto.

Researchers also found the probability that a female fetus was aborted was more than twice as likely among educated mothers than illiterate ones. However, once a boy was born, the gender ratio was roughly equal, said the report.

"We conservatively estimate that prenatal sex determination and selective abortion account for 0.5 million missing girls yearly," Jha wrote.

"If this practice has been common for most of the past two decades since access to ultrasound became widespread, then a figure of 10m (million) missing female births would not be unreasonable."

Researchers analyzed information about 133,738 births.

Based on the ratio of girls to boys in other countries, they estimated that 13.6 million to 13.8 million girls should have been born in 1997 in India. However, they found just 13.1 million were born.

Abortion for sex selection has been illegal in India since 1994. But the practice is widely believed to continue, to the point that India's gender ratio among its population of 1.06 billion has been skewed.

In 2001, there were 927 girls per 1,000 boys. Ten years before that, there were 945 girls per 1,000 boys, according to government census-takers.

Daughters are often regarded as a liability in India because they leave their families after marriage and "belong" to their husband's families. Many families must also borrow money to pay a dowry to the families of the husbands.