Mount Abu, Rajasthan: I wouldn’t be around to write this story if the Bahri clan I hail from—Hindus from Punjab, Pakistan—had not stopped practising female infanticide in the early 1900s, with my grandparents’ generation. But a century on, the practice appears to have hit an all-time high.

Latest figures show that at 914, India’s child sex ratio—a better marker of son preference than the overall sex ratio—is at its lowest since 1951.

This is despite the fact that female literacy in India has soared to 65.46% as per Census 2011 and should have resulted in greater gender parity in the child sex ratio.