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.