The Center for Disease Dynamics, Economics & Policy

Despite strong recent economic growth, gender inequality remains a major concern for India. This paper examines the eectiveness of a public policy geared towards the reduction of gender inequality. The national Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostics Techniques (PNDT) Act of 1994, implemented in 1996, banned sex-selective abortions in the Indian states which hitherto had not legislated such a policy. Although demographers frequently mention the futility of the Act, this paper is among the rst to evaluate the law using a treatment-eect type analysis of the pre-ban and post-ban periods. Using village-level and town-level longitudinal data from the 1991 and 2001 censuses, we nd a signicantly positive impact of the PNDT Act on the female-to-male child sex ratio (number of females per 1000 males below the age of 6 years). Given the almost ubiquitous decline in the observed child sex ratio during the study period, Our results are interpreted as the success of the law in hindering any further worsening of the gender imbalance. We nd that in the possible absence of the PNDT Act, child sex ratio would have declined by another 13-20 points, or an additional 51,000 female fetuses would have been aborted. Additional analysis using quantile regressions of the conditional distribution of the rural child sex ratio reveals the heterogeneity among communities with respect to their response to the law.