The Indian government said on January 29 that there were more than 63 million women “missing” from its population and that 2 million go “missing” across age groups every year because of abortion of female foetuses, disease, neglect and inadequate nutrition. There are also 21 million unwanted girls, the government said.

The 2017-18 estimate, released as part of the country’s annual economic survey, reinforced the work of researchers and social scientists, who have argued that decades of son preference in India and its parallel in China, the One Child policy, have produced a man-made demographic bubble of excess males — those now under 25 top 50 million — in the two countries and may have long-term impacts on crime, human trafficking, the overall savings rate and the ability of these excess males to find brides.

“We know that the sex ratio in India is highly skewed,” the government’s chief economic adviser, Arvind Subramanian, said at a news event, noting that the study further showed that Indians have a “meta” son preference, which means that if they have girls, they’ll keep on having children until they get a boy.