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The last child’s gender still tells the truth

Though the incidence of son preference in Indian families has fallen, there is still little preference for daughters.

Instead of asking parents, just count their children to get a sense of what India genuinely values. From 1.33 males for every girl at the first birth to 1.43 at the second and 1.51 at the third, the sex ratio of a family’s last child becomes increasingly skewed over NFHS-5.

This is deliberate; it’s not a coincidence. This nation has a long tradition of waiting for a son before allowing fertility to stop. And no phrase captures the consequences of this behaviour more sharply than the one introduced in the Economic Survey 2017-18: “21 million unwanted girls.” The term may have disappeared from headlines, but the behaviour that produced it remains firmly in place. The last child still tells the truth.

This insight becomes more evident when we analyse the evolution of attitudes over time. India today articulates a more confident stance regarding equality between sons and daughters. Survey responses seem promising. Parents are significantly less inclined than three decades ago to explicitly express a preference for males.

Girl reluctance

However, scarcely anyone articulates a preference for daughters. And asNFHS-5 demonstrates, “equal preference” frequently conceals a persistent reluctance to terminate fertility with a female child. The transition is primarily verbal rather than behavioural.

The NFHS trend over 30 years captures this gap between changing language and unchanging lineage expectations. Son preference in attitudes has fallen; daughter preference has barely risen. The supposedly neutral “equal preference” category has expanded instead, but it has not translated into gender-neutral stopping behaviour.

This is why the sex of the last-born child remains the most honest indicator of what families actually want. If India had moved beyond son preference, the sex ratio of the last child would hover near natural levels. Instead, as birth order rises, the skew deepens. Families rarely stop after a daughter, but almost always stop after a son. In demographic terms, this pattern is called “son-biased stopping”. In human terms, it means daughters are rarely the child that completes a family.

Story of unwanted girls

These are not merely numbers. They represent the structural forces that create “unwanted girls.” A girl becomes “unwanted” not because her family dislikes her, but because she was born in a household that continued childbearing to produce a son. She enters a family already larger than intended, already stretched in terms of income, nutrition, attention, and care. Research consistently shows that last-born girls in son-seeking families receive fewer vaccinations, are breastfed for shorter durations, have lower nutritional outcomes, and drop out of school earlier. It is rarely deliberate discrimination; it is the silent arithmetic of scarcity in households that exceed their desired size.

The enduring nature of this pattern also accounts for why development alone has not addressed son preference. Education enhances attitudes but does not entirely eliminate patrilineal expectations. Increasing in-comes generate opportunities but do not undermine the norms that as-sociate family name, rituals, inheritance, and old-age security with sons.

Even in States characterised by high levels of human development —such as Punjab, Haryana — the sex ratio of the most recent infant re-mains markedly skewed in favour of males.

North-East outlier

The one region that consistently breaks this pattern is the North-East. In Meghalaya, where inheritance flows through daughters in its matrilineal system, daughter preference exceeds son preference. Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, and Sikkim show milder versions of this trend.

Where daughters remain within the natal family — legally, ritually, and economically— fertility patterns become gender-neutral. In contrast, across much of India, daughters are still imagined as leaving the family, and sons as carrying it forward. Culture, not wealth, determines whether a daughter can be the last child.

Little behavioural change

This is why the argument that the issue is outdated misses the point. The terminology may have entered the public lexicon in 2018, butNFHS-5 proves that the underlying behaviour remains alive. The Economic Survey offered a vocabulary — unwanted girls, son meta-preference, last-born indicators. The latest data shows these are not historical curiosities, but contemporary realities. The story is not old; the fail-ure to address it is.

India’s policy approach has long focused on preventing sex-selective abortion. While this legal restriction was essential to address the enormous crisis of “missing girls,” it also shifted the problem rather than solving it. When families could determine the sex of the foetus, the girlswho were born were, at the very least, wanted.

Once the law made that impossible — as it rightly did — the same underlying preference reappeared in a different form. Parents who cannot choose the sex of a child before birth often pursue the same outcome after birth by continuing childbearing. The result is fewer “missing girls” but more “unwanted girls” —daughters born not because the family chose them, but because the family was still waiting for a son.

Limits of law

The site of discrimination has moved from the prenatal clinic to the everyday home, revealing that laws can curb a practice but cannot, by themselves, transform the norms that drive it.

Correcting this requires more than incremental reform; it demands a structural recalibration of how families, communities and institutions value daughters. Families need reliable, universal old-age support that does not force them to treat sons as insurance policies. Inheritance and property rights for daughters must be implemented with intent — enforced in practice, not admired only in legislation.

Women must have real agency in decisions about if and when to have children, because fertility patterns will not change as long as patriarchal expectations decide the acceptable end-point of a family. And India must nurture a cultural shift in which lineage, obligation and identity are no longer imagined as the exclusive domain of boys.

Until these deeper transformations take root, India’s demographic data will continue to repeat the same quiet message. Fertility may fall, education may rise, and attitudes may soften, but the sex of the last-born child will keep exposing what families cannot say aloud. The day a daughter can be the final child because the family feels complete — not because its patience has worn thin — will be the day India moves be-yond its hidden hierarchy of births. Until then, the last child will continue to tell the truth.

Deka is Fellow at NCAER; Das is Assistant Professor at IEG, Delhi. Views are personal.

NCAER News: November 2025

NCAER News is a monthly digest where you can learn about NCAER’s research outputs, its latest events, and offerings.

Africa’s Ubuntu economics takes the G20 stage

2026 will determine whether philosophical ambition becomes institutional reality.

 

At the G20’s 20th meeting in Johannesburg in November 2025, the Declaration placed the African humanist Ubuntu philosophy – ‘I am because we are’ – at the centre of its framing for global economic governance.

This was more than rhetorical flourish. The statement reflects a convergence of analysis across multilateral institutions, how Africa’s economic trajectory has become central to global financial stability and the prevailing architecture is no longer adequate to manage the resulting interdependence. The coming year will determine whether this conceptual shift translates into institutional reform.

Structural pressures and the new consensus

Across 2025, a surprisingly coherent diagnosis emerged from the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development and COP30. Developing countries paid an estimated $921bn in net interest in 2024, while approximately 3.4bn people now live in economies spending more on debt service than on health and education combined. These figures do not merely indicate cyclical stress; they describe a structural imbalance that is undermining fiscal resilience and suppressing long-term investment.

Rather than reverting to conventional discussions of temporary liquidity support, the emerging consensus centres on three mutually reinforcing shifts: the broader adoption of state-contingent sovereign instruments; the systematic correction of risk mispricing in African capital markets; and greater collective bargaining power among African borrowers. Together, these shifts represent an attempt to align the financial architecture with the macroeconomic realities African countries face.

State-contingent finance

For many African economies, volatility – not stability – is the baseline. Climate-related losses of 2-3% of gross domestic product per year, combined with commodity-price swings that add around 1.5% to fiscal volatility, create a macroeconomic environment poorly served by traditional debt contracts. The prevailing system compounds this instability by forcing sovereigns to borrow at elevated spreads, often above 700-900 basis points, when their repayment capacity is at its weakest.

State-contingent instruments provide a design-based response. By suspending payments when independently observable triggers, such as rainfall deficits, commodity price collapses or GDP contractions, are breached, they transform sovereign borrowing from a procyclical amplifier into a countercyclical stabiliser. Model-based simulations indicate potential reductions in fiscal uncertainty of roughly 18-22%. Trevor Manuel’s Africa Expert Panel has outlined operational templates that rely on verifiable data sources and minimise the risk of discretionary activation. Nigeria’s experience illustrates the stakes: avoiding three emergency borrowing episodes per decade could save approximately $4.2bn – resources equivalent to the cost of immunising all children in West Africa.

Correcting systematic risk mispricing

A second pillar of reform addresses a long-standing anomaly: African infrastructure investments generate high returns, 22.4% on average in International Finance Corporation samples. Yet, African sovereigns continue to face borrowing costs 400-500bp above peers with comparable repayment histories. Part of this discrepancy reflects structural features. Still, a major share stems from the concentration of sovereign credit assessments among three major rating agencies whose methodologies often overstate macro-financial risk in African contexts.

The sovereign-ceiling convention, which prevents private borrowers from being rated above their sovereign even when fundamentals warrant stronger ratings, remains particularly distortive. Kenya’s mobile-money ecosystem, with default rates around 0.3%, continues to face misaligned borrowing costs. The African Credit Rating Agency, established in 2025, has begun systematically documenting these inconsistencies.

Under upper-bound estimates, correcting the most distortionary methodological assumptions could unlock between $2-3tn in productive investment over a decade, figures consistent with the continent’s infrastructure financing gap and the cumulative impact of lower sovereign spreads and improved project bankability.

This recalibration gains further significance as energy-transition dynamics evolve. Africa possesses roughly 70% of global cobalt reserves and around half of global manganese deposits – minerals essential to electric vehicle batteries and steel production. COP30’s valuation of carbon sequestration in the Congo Basin at approximately $150bn annually underscores the extent to which African ecological assets underpin global climate stability. Yet current risk models seldom incorporate these structural contributions.

Coordinated bargaining

Fragmented negotiation has historically reduced African borrowers’ leverage, leaving them exposed to higher spreads and less favourable contractual terms. Concentrated creditors, whether private bondholders or official lenders, benefit structurally from unified positions. The Borrowers’ Club, to be formally launched in Addis Ababa in early 2026, aims to correct this asymmetry. By standardising key clauses, sharing contract templates and synchronising restructuring timetables, participating countries seek to narrow information asymmetries. Early modelling suggests that such coordination could reduce refinancing costs by 125-175bp, equivalent to around $11bn annually on current external debt stocks.

The initiative coincides with a reassessment inside the IMF. Africa’s present 5.2% voting share sits awkwardly alongside the fact that African countries account for roughly 40% of the IMF’s outstanding lending. Movement towards an 8% voting share, while still modest relative to broader reforms required, would represent a meaningful shift in global economic governance.

Figure 1. Africa’s systemic position

Indicator (2024-25) Africa’s position Sources
Share of IMF lending exposure ~40% of outstanding IMF credit IMF Financial Statements (2024–25)⁴
Share of global net interest payments (developing economies) ~22% attributable to African borrowers UNCTAD World of Debt 2025¹
Share of global cobalt reserves ~70% of known reserves USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (2024)
Share of global manganese reserves ~50% of global reserves USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries (2024)
Average infrastructure returns 22.4% (IFC project sample) IFC Creating Markets in Africa (2025)³
Countries spending more on debt service than on health/education 54 globally, majority in Africa UNCTAD¹; UNESCO education and health data

Sources: IMF, UNCTAD, USGS, IFC, UNESCO education and health data

Figure 1 illustrates the core argument: Africa is simultaneously system-exposed and system-critical. Its macroeconomic vulnerabilities cannot be separated from its strategic resources, demographic trajectory or ecological role.


Remaining gaps

Despite stronger analytical convergence, three weaknesses persist. Technology remains insufficiently integrated: blockchain-based registries, artificial intelligence-driven risk analytics and automated smart-contract triggers could materially reduce transaction costs but remain underdeveloped in global standards. Private-creditor incentives remain poorly aligned with systemic requirements, particularly given that private lenders hold roughly 61% of Africa’s external debt. The risk of holdout behaviour, seen in several recent sovereign cases, remains significant. Oversight mechanisms also lag behind ambition. Historical G20 compliance averages around 15%; without transparent monitoring, political commitments may not translate into implementation.

Inflection point

The year ahead constitutes a decisive test. The launch of the Borrowers’ Club in Addis Ababa, the design of a new refinancing mechanism in April 2026 and the IMF quota review later in the year form a sequential assessment of political resolve and institutional capability. Whether the philosophical framing articulated in Johannesburg becomes embedded in practice will depend on decisions taken over the next 12 months.

Ubuntu economics does not invoke moral claims. It advances a structural argument: Africa’s demographic momentum, mineral endowments and ecological assets are central to global prosperity, and instability in the region imposes system-wide costs. The reform frameworks are now primarily in place. The question is whether the political and institutional conditions of 2026 permit their implementation.

If this alignment holds, Africa’s reform agenda could mark the most significant recalibration of global finance since the early 2000s. If it falters, the system will remain constrained by an architecture increasingly misaligned with the realities of an interdependent world.

Udaibir Das is a Visiting Professor at the National Council of Applied Economic Research, Senior Non-Resident Adviser at the Bank of England, Senior Adviser of the International Forum for Sovereign Wealth Funds, and Distinguished Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation America.

Green hydrogen needs blue thinking

The challenge is to produce green hydrogen without depleting water reserves. Using seawater could be a viable alternative.

It is not often that a single molecule captures the imagination of an entire nation. But hydrogen — the lightest element on Earth — is suddenly carrying the heaviest expectations of India’s clean-energy transition. In global climate conversations, it is no longer a whisper; it is a thunderous promise. As India races to unlock vast renewable capacity and industries chart their decarbonisation paths, green hydrogen is emerging as the fuel that could power factories, clean up refineries, and propel long-haul transport without carbon emissions.

At the centre of this vision is the National Green Hydrogen Mission, led by MNRE with support from key ministries, which targets five million tonnes annually by 2030, backed by hydrogen valleys, industrial parks, and electrolyser manufacturing. Confidence is high that India can meet its climate goals and shape global supply chains — yet beneath this excitement lies a quieter, more fragile reality.

India’s green hydrogen ambition faces a stark water-energy paradox. Electrolysis demands nearly nine litres of purified water per kilogram of hydrogen, far more when accounting for cooling and purification losses. Yet, India already extracts one-quarter of the world’s groundwater (more than China and the US combined), with aquifers falling by up to four metres due to subsidised farm pumping. Several States blessed with intense solar radiation — ideal for powering electrolysers — are simultaneously cursed with extreme water stress. This includes Rajasthan, Gujarat, Odisha and Tamil Nadu.

Hydrogen plants are rapidly emerging — from Kandla and Kutch to Gorakhpur, Bikaner, Mangaluru, Thoothukudi, Gopalpur and soon Andhra Pradesh, alongside inland sites in Hisar and Baddi. But geography matters: producing six million tonnes of hydrogen could demand 132–192 million tonnes of water annually, rivalling major cities’ drinking needs. Therefore, the challenge then is not whether India can produce green hydrogen. It is whether it can produce it without taxing the water on which lives and livelihoods depend.

Hydrogen without regret

The answer to this dilemma is not to slow the hydrogen mission — but to site it smarter, design it wiser, and power it circularly. Coastal hydrogen hubs can draw seawater rather than freshwater. Global footprints are turning to the ocean to fuel the hydrogen revolution — from Scotland’s EMEC, which has produced hydrogen from tidal energy and seawater since 2017. Other projects in Australia, Singapore, Norway, and France that integrate seawater electrolysis with offshore renewables. These initiatives demonstrate how coastal and marine energy systems can enable sustainable hydrogen production without depleting scarce freshwater reserves.

India should follow these footsteps, creating an innovative method to produce hydrogen from alkaline seawater using low-cost, corrosion resistant bimetallic catalysts — a breakthrough that circumvents the chloride corrosion typically associated with saltwater electrolysis. A novel global experiment has demonstrated that replacing the traditional, high-cost metallic positive electrode with a non-metallic, low-cost alternative is feasible. This low-cost, high-performance solution could redefine the future of seawater electrolysis, with the capacity to produce green hydrogen at an industrial level. This would enable India to scale up its coastal hydrogen plants sustainably, transforming its vast shorelines into hubs of green innovation.

Scaling such coastal hydrogen systems demands evolved policy: coordinated MNRE–Jal Shakti planning, hydrological budgeting, water use audits, and incentives for non-freshwater inputs. Ports such as Kandla, Paradip, and Thoothukudi could become hubs for green ammonia exports, while inland plants should rely on treated wastewater rather than groundwater.

India’s hydrogen story is a rare convergence of industrial ambition, climate necessity, and geopolitical opportunity. If India pulls too hard on the “hydrogen rope” without easing the “water knot,” the transition risks swapping carbon scarcity for water scarcity.

Pohit is a Professor, and Mondal is a Research Associate at the NCAER. Views are personal.

Health SDGs are at risk from climate change: Evidence from India

Climate change poses significant risks to human health in India, with 80% of the population located in areas highly vulnerable to extreme events, such as cyclones, floods and heatwaves. While India has made progress on several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), risks from climate change can undermine the achievements. This study examines the impact of climate vulnerability on health related targets under the SDG2 on Zero Hunger and SDG3 on Good Health and Well-being. Statistical and econometric methods including a multivariate logistic regression are used to examine the relationship between climate vulnerability, social and economic determinants of health and health outcomes in 575 districts of rural India. 2 national datasets are used for the analysis, namely, a health survey and a climate risk and vulnerability assessment, with a sample size of 154,547 children and 447,348 women. A highly significant and negative relationship is found between climate vulnerability and attainment levels of health outcomes. Districts that are highly vulnerable to climate change consistently underperform on the studied health targets as compared to districts which are less vulnerable to climate change. For instance, the chance of children being underweight and that of women having non-institutional deliveries, is 1.25 and 1.38 times higher, respectively, in districts that are highly vulnerable to climate change than districts that are less vulnerable. While the extent of the adverse impact varies, the findings establish the necessity to take account of the adverse impacts of climate change on health outcomes, apart from the socio-economic and access related factors that have conventionally been considered as relevant in influencing these outcomes. in LMICs like India. There is an urgent need for timely action to address climate change risks, including effective adaption in health, to ensure that the desired health and well-being outcomes can be achieved and sustained, amidst rising climate risks.

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