This sexist mentality surely has its roots in the (60 per cent Sikh) state of Punjab, which has among the lowest ratios of women to men in India due gender-selective abortions, infanticide, neglect of girls, rape and dowry-related murders.
In China, however, it is estimated that there are now 20% more men of marriageable age than women the result of selective abortion and infanticide consequent upon the country's "one-child" policy.
The skewed sex ratio at birth has been known for more than a hundred years, and researchers have found a large variety of social, economic and biological factors that correlate with it — war, economic stress, age, diet, selective abortion or infanticide and more.
They start with the practice of sex-selective abortion and infanticide, and continue through adolescent and adult life with high levels of female infant mortality, child marriage, teenage pregnancy, lesser wages for women, unsafe workplaces, domestic violence, maternal mortality, sexual assault and neglect of elderly women.
It is in a race with time: its population is rapidly ageing and not replacing itself, its crazy tradition of female infanticide and selective abortion of females means there is a superfluity of males so that girls are being kidnapped as brides.
But Ms Singh's parents say something revealing when they recall how friends were mystified when they celebrated Jyoti's birth "as if she were a boy", the same something that's borne out in the large male majority among Indian infants, a gender gap in which selective abortion and even infanticide have surely played a part.
In SuperFreakonomics, the authors cite Amartya Sen, who identified India's gender disparity in 1990 and correctly attributed it to selective abortions and female infanticide.
