Legal reforms have been at the centre of the agenda for strategizing gender justice in India. This has been so, right from the time of nine-teenth century social reforms movements, through the period of nationalist struggles, down to the contemporary women's movement.

We use data from the 1981 and 1991 censuses of India to examine (a) sex ratios among infants aged under 2, (b) child mortality (q5) by sex, and (c) estimated period sex ratios at birth (SRB) calculated by reverse survival methods, to see whether bias against female children pers