Punjab has had among the most skewed child sex ratios in India. The 2001 census recorded 798 girls per 1,000 boys aged 0 to 6, the lowest in the country at the time. It improved to 846 in 2011 and has improved further since, and it remains well below the biological norm.
The mechanism was sex-selective abortion after ultrasound became cheap and widely available from the 1980s. Prosperity made it worse rather than better: the districts with the most skewed ratios were often the wealthier ones, because the technology cost money.
The Pre-Conception and Pre-Natal Diagnostic Techniques Act prohibits sex determination. Enforcement has been weak and convictions few.
The reasons behind it are dowry, land inheritance, and the practice of village exogamy in which a daughter leaves and a son stays. None of these is unique to Punjab and the combination here was particularly strong.
The consequence is a cohort of men who will not marry, and marriage migration of women into Punjab from other states, which brings its own problems.
This is the hardest single fact in this project and it is not attributable to anyone but Punjabi families.
Punjab's sex ratio at birth was among the worst in India through the 1990s and 2000s and has improved since, and it is still below the natural ratio.
Prenatal sex determination has been illegal since 1994 and prosecutions are rare. The technology moved to unregistered clinics and across state lines.
The reasons families give are the cost of marrying a daughter and the land passing out of the family. Both are economic and neither has been addressed by any policy.