In China and India, men outnumber women on a massive scale. The consequences are far-reaching.

In China and India, men outnumber women

on a massive scale. The consequences are
far-reaching.

(Lu Liu/for The Washington Post)

Nothing like this has happened in human history. A combination of cultural

preferences, government decree and modern medical technology in the world’s
two largest countries has created a gender imbalance on a continental scale. Men
outnumber women by 70 million in China and India.

The consequences of having too many men, now coming of age, are far-reaching:
Beyond an epidemic of loneliness, the imbalance distorts labor markets, drives up
savings rates in China and drives down consumption, artificially inflates certain
property values, and parallels increases in violent crime, trafficking or
prostitution in a growing number of locations.

Those consequences are not confined to China and India, but reach deep into
their Asian neighbors and distort the economies of Europe and the Americas, as
well. Barely recognized, the ramifications of too many men are only starting to
come into sight.

“In the future, there will be millions of men who can’t marry, and that could pose
a very big risk to society,” warns Li Shuzhuo, a leading demographer at Xi’an
Jiaotong University.

Out of China’s population of 1.4 billion, there are nearly 34 million more males
than females — the equivalent of almost the entire population of California, or
Poland, who will never find wives and only rarely have sex. China’s official one-
child policy, in effect from 1979 to 2015, was a huge factor in creating this
imbalance, as millions of couples were determined that their child should be a
son.

India, a country that has a deeply held preference for sons and male heirs, has an
excess of 37 million males, according to its most recent census. The number of
newborn female babies compared with males has continued to plummet, even as
the country grows more developed and prosperous. The imbalance creates a
surplus of bachelors and exacerbates human trafficking, both for brides and,
possibly, prostitution. Officials attribute this to the advent of sex-selective
technology in the last 30 years, which is now banned but still in widespread
practice.

In the two countries, 50 million excess males are under age 20.

Both nations are belatedly trying to come to grips with the policies that created
this male-heavy generation. And demographers say it will take decades for the
ramifications of the bulge to fade away.

In the four sections below are personal tales that show how the imbalance has

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affected:

Village life and mental health. Among men, loneliness and depression are
widespread. Villages are emptying out. Men are learning to cook and perform
other chores long relegated to women. Stagnant lives

Housing prices and savings rates. Bachelors are furiously building houses in
China to attract wives, and prices are soaring. But otherwise they are not
spending, and that in turn fuels China’s huge trade surplus. In India, there is the
opposite effect: Because brides are scarce, families are under less pressure to save
for expensive dowries. The desperate effort to land a bride

Human trafficking. Trafficking of brides is on the rise. Foreign women are

being recruited and lured to China, effectively creating similar imbalances in
China’s neighbors. Importing a bride

Public safety. With the increase in men has come a surge in sexual crime in
India and concerns about a rise in other crimes in both countries. Harassment of
schoolgirls in India has in some towns sparked an effort to push back — but at a
cost of restricting them to more protected lives. Taking a stand over
harassment

‘Life is boring and lonely’

Li Weibin has never had a girlfriend. Boys outnumbered girls in the isolated
mountain village where he grew up, in the factories where he worked as a
teenager, and on the construction sites where he now earns a modest wage.

Today, 30 years old, he lives in a bare, stuffy dormitory room with five other men
in the southern city of Dongguan, bunk beds lining the walls, cigarette butts
carpeting the floor.

“I want to find a girlfriend, but I don’t have the money or the opportunity to meet
them,” he said. “Girls have very high standards; they want houses and cars. They
don’t want to talk to me.”

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Construction worker Li Weibin, 30, has never had a girlfriend. (Giulia Marchi/For

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The Washington Post)

Li’s problem is not only that he is poor and struggling to save enough money to
buy an apartment of his own; it is that in China there are simply too many men.
This is a country where marriage confers social status, and where parental
pressure to produce grandchildren is intense. Bachelors like Li are dismissively
branded as “bare branches” for failing to expand the family tree.

But as any forester knows, bare branches pose a danger, and not just to
themselves.

In Dongguan, where the gender ratio is 118 men to 100 women, Li says he has
virtually given up hope of finding a girlfriend. He spends his spare time playing
games on his phone, or accompanying his co-workers to karaoke or for a foot
massage.

“It is just me,” he said. “Life is boring and lonely.”

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Om Pati is the mother of seven sons, including from left, Sandeep, Sanjay and

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Suresh. (Poras Chaudhary/For The Washington Post)

‘May you be the mother of a hundred sons’

When Om Pati, a farmer’s wife in the Indian village of Bass, in the state of
Haryana, was having children, she actually prayed a sweet-eyed girl bundle would
arrive. But instead she had a son. Then another, and another — seven in all. Her
neighbors in the village were overjoyed for her each time a new baby arrived. They
rang steel plates so everyone in the neighborhood would know a boy had been
born.

After all, this is a culture where male children are desired above all else — to light
the Hindu funeral pyre, inherit property, care for aging parents. As the Sanskrit
blessing says, “May you be the mother of a hundred sons.”

Sometimes it felt to Om Pati like she was the mother of 100 sons. She worked
from sunrise until night. She consoled herself with the thought that she would one
day have daughters-in-law to trade stories and share cooking duties.
Grandchildren, too.

But by the time her eldest Sanjay — now 38 and a cook — reached marriageable
age, the practice of families in her area sneaking off to larger cities for an illegal
sonogram and then an abortion had taken its toll. When she and her husband
began seeking matches for arranged marriage, still the norm, there were no
suitable brides. The few young women had all married — that is, those who hadn’t
left for better opportunities elsewhere.

These days, Om Pati, now 60, spends her days cooking and cleaning for her
husband and adult sons, who range from age 22 to 38. They gobble up so many
rotis — the flat-round bread loaves that are a household staple, each one shaped
in her calloused hands — that she goes through several pounds of flour a day.

“There is no other option,” she said. “It’s not in our hands.” 

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Suresh Kumar says the suffocation he feels as a single 35-year-old is palpable.

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In China and India, men outnumber women on a massive scale. The consequences are far-reaching.

(Poras Chaudhary/For The Washington Post)

‘No one knows how sad I feel’

Suresh Kumar once dreamed of getting married, with a procession through the
lanes of Bass, a bride adorned in gold and the kind of ceremony that was once a
near-universal rite of passage for Indian men.

But after one potential engagement fell apart, no other suitable brides could be
found. He even went back to earn his high school degree in hopes of being a more
attractive suitor.

Still no one. Now Kumar is in his mid-30s, long past what is considered
marriageable age in India, and is beginning to face a hard truth — that a wife and
a family won’t happen for him.

“People say, ‘You don’t have a wife and children at home to care for — why are you
working so hard?’ ” Kumar said. “I laugh on the outside but the pain that I have in
my heart only I know.”

The men themselves are isolated, left out of major family decisions and subject to
ridicule, with little in the way of support or mental health services. Worse, in the
traditional culture of villages, those who missed out on marriage have no hope of
female companionship — dating or having a girlfriend is out of the question.

One recent evening, a family threw a rooftop party to celebrate the birth of a boy.
Parties to welcome girl babies are still so rare they are covered by the local
newspaper. Before the guests arrived, Kumar huddled in a stairwell nearby,
sweating over a cast-iron pot, cracking jokes with friends as he fried sweet
pancakes for the guests.

He likes to cook, he says, but the role occasionally unbalances him.

During a harvest festival last year, his mother was delayed in another town. So
Kumar was left to prepare the pancakes on his own. As he flipped the cakes in the
bubbling oil, he grew teary-eyed, thinking of how there was no wife and kids to eat
the treats he was making.

Shaofeng’s problem — one faced by millions of his countrymen — is a product of

cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology.

Shaofeng’s problem — one faced by millions of his countrymen — is a product of

cultural preferences, government decree and modern medical technology. In
China, there are simply too many men. (Lu Liu/for The Washington Post)

With a wife, he says, “there would be somebody to make tea for me, to tell me
when to take a bath. We don’t have much value as unmarried men in this society.
Everybody thinks, ‘What problem does this man have? What is lacking in his
family? What is lacking in him?’ ”

Evenings are the loneliest times, when the village folds into itself, minders return
with their cows from the pond, smoke wafts from evening meals, schoolchildren
still in their plaid school uniforms play in the uneven lanes. Kumar shuts himself
in his room.

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“I watch TV, romantic movies sometimes,” Kumar says. “What can I do? It’s up to
me then. What I feel inside stays inside.”

It wasn’t supposed to end up this way. When he was in high school he had a brief
romance with a classmate, a beautiful 17-year-old, tall and slim, with two braids
that reached down her back. Even now he cannot speak of her without singing a
few bars of an Urdu love song. “I looked for her on Facebook just yesterday,” he
says.

But the tryst was discovered, the parents put a stop to it, and his classmate
eventually married someone else. And the family wasn’t able to find any other
suitable prospective brides for him.

“We feel it, but this is a problem in every house,” said his mother, Bhima, sitting
with her son after the party in the dimly lit courtyard of the modest house where
they live.

Sometimes, Kumar says, the suffocation he feels is palpable:

“You know how when there’s no wind and a plant is sitting there and the leaves
are not moving? That’s how the man feels: You’re just stationary.”

The desperate effort toland a bride

To catch a wife, build a house

‘If you want to find a wife, you have to build a house’

Today, young people are fleeing the villages in a desperate search for fortune, and
marriage. The best way to find a bachelor in rural China these days: look for
someone building a house.

Li Defu is typical. Now 21, he left home seven years ago to find work in the
provincial capital Guiyang, but he has pooled the family savings to build a 10-
room house overlooking the green hills and valleys of his birthplace, Paifeng.

The reason is simple: It is the only chance he has of finding a wife.

“At the moment there aren’t any girls my age around,” he said, on a recent trip
home to supervise the construction. “But I am building this new house in
preparation, in case I find someone.”

Li was brought up by his grandmother, a tiny, wizened woman who sat beside him
as he chatted. His parents still work in far-off factories; the savings they have
collected could be crucial.

Around $10,000, Li reckons, will have to be paid to his future bride’s family, just
to gain their approval for the engagement. A centuries-old tradition, the “bride
price” in China is similar to a dowry elsewhere in the world, but paid from
groom’s family to the bride’s parents — rather than the other way around.

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A 24-year-old who gave only his family name, Wang, came to Guangdong

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province to work when he was 14. He has saved enough to build a house back
home but struggles to find a wife. (Giulia Marchi/For The Washington Post)

A decade or two back, the typical bride price was just a few hundred dollars.
Today, in some parts of China, the average is nearly $30,000, according to a
survey by the People’s Daily newspaper.

That translates into huge pressure for young men like Li and their families.
Indeed, helping to build Li’s house was another young man who was already
feeling that pressure.

“There are very few girls here, and many girls from outside won’t want to marry
into this village because it’s poor,” said 25-year-old Zhou Haijiang, as he laid the
tiles in one of the house’s many bathrooms. Only a show of prosperity can attract,
and hold, a bride.

“In our village, if you want to find a wife, you have to build a house.”

Zhou said he would like to stay in Paifeng all his life, but the pay isn’t good, and
he will soon reluctantly join the tide of migrant workers heading for China’s
booming megacities, in search of riches — and brides.

Many unmarried Chinese men have made their way to cities like Dongguan in
southern China’s Pearl River Delta, a vast urban agglomeration nicknamed the
“factory of the world.”

Their work ethic, their determination to succeed, is remarkable.

In a noodle shop close to a series of shoe factories, a 24-year-old who gave only
his family name, Wang, was enjoying dinner with some friends. In between
mouthfuls, he said he left his home in rural western China a decade ago and now
works 11 or 12 hours a day, with just two days off a month.

He has already saved enough to build a house back in his home village, but is still
struggling to find a wife.

“If you are picky, it’s hard,” he said. “There are also more boys here, and it is not
necessarily easy to meet girls.”

Importing brides
‘You are my slave’

‘My wife didn’t run away . . . Everyone says how nice she is’

Liu Hua couldn’t find a wife in China. So he decided to buy a foreign one. His
sister and mother helped him choose from a selection of Cambodian women who
had come to China looking for husbands, eventually picking out a slim girl with a
nice smile.

Their main concern — she was a bit taller than him. That, and worrying about
what the neighbors would think.

“People in the village said she’d run away; they thought a foreign wife wasn’t as

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good as a Chinese wife,” said Liu, who lives in Leping in southeastern China’s
Jiangxi province. “But now they don’t think so any more. My wife didn’t run
away; she is friendly with the neighbors and treats them politely. Everyone says
how nice she is.”

His wife, Lili, is among tens of thousands of foreign women who are flocking here
for marriage, pushed by poverty at home and sucked in by China’s dramatic
shortage of women.

Leping has become a center for the trade in Cambodian women: in village after
village, they are easy to spot, looking after young children and picking them up
from school, or just hanging out watching their husbands play mah-jongg.

In Huangling, a village two hours’ drive to the north of Leping, Liu and Lili’s was
the first of several transnational marriages.

“Our village has 50 or 60 bachelors and only one or two single women,” said Liu.
“For men who are 40 or even older, Cambodian women are like a second chance.”

But for the women involved, it is a huge gamble, being catapulted into families
where daughters-in-law often occupy the lowest status of all, especially foreign
ones who have just been “bought.”

Not surprising, then, that Lili’s mother didn’t want her to come. You don’t speak
the language, you don’t know anyone, it’s dangerous, she warned.

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Liu Lili is a success story among foreign-bought brides. She and Liu Hua married

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in 2013 and have two children in China. (Yan Cong/For The Washington Post)

But in Cambodia, daughters are expected to help support the family financially.
Lili’s father had died, and there were three young brothers to bring up and get
through school. Her village, in central Cambodia’s Kampong Cham province,
offered no real employment opportunities.

Lili, who was born Sreynich Yorn in Cambodia, was paid the equivalent of $450,
plus travel expenses, and promised a relatively well-paid job in a Chinese factory
when she arrived, provided she agreed to get married.

“I wanted the money, for my mother,” she said.

Liu said he paid deposits ranging from $5,000 to $40,000 to three local families,
just for the right to date their daughters, and got only some of the money back
when the matches didn’t work out.

Fed up with demanding Chinese families, he eventually decided to pay a broker

nearly $15,000 for Lili, who took a Chinese name after moving there.

The two profess to be content, living in a house filled with photos of their wedding
and their two young children, a 4-year-old boy, Siyiuan, and his 1-year-old sister
Sisi. In one, they sit on a park bench, he in his best gray suit and red tie, she in a
white wedding dress carrying a bunch of red and white roses, together making the
shape of a heart with their arms.

Both insist theirs is a genuine marriage, not a transaction. Happily, Liu’s mother
approves.

But Lili still feels cheated, especially after she found out how much her husband
had paid. The job she was promised never materialized, and she is furious with
the marriage broker for pocketing almost all the fee.

“She lied to me for money,” she said.

Lili spends her days looking after her two young children. Her husband, a painter
and decorator, is often away for work, but her mother-in-law seems sympathetic,
even proud of the young woman who brought her two grandchildren.

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Liu Hua and his wife, Lili, with their son at their wedding ceremony in 2015. (Yan

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Cong/For The Washington Post) The couple’s marriage certificate and a 2013
photo. (Yan Cong/For The Washington Post)

Her own mother even visited here last year, and went home with a wad of money,
around $1,500, that will help the rest of the family.

She is one of the lucky ones.

“My husband is a good man and he treats me well,” she said.

“I don’t want to go back. I have children now.”

One 32-year-old woman, interviewed in the Cambodian capital Phnom Penh, said
she had been enticed to come to China with the promise of a factory job. But when
she landed, she was forced to marry a man she didn’t like.

“My husband said to me: ‘You are my slave; I bought you. If I want, I can do
anything to you.’”

Her new family locked her in the house to prevent her from fleeing, she said. Her
husband demanded sex four times a day. If she refused, she was beaten.

Finally, she had a baby girl. Seven days after birth, her husband demanded sex
again, and when she refused, beat her, she said. Two years later, she recalled, she
had a miscarriage, was denied medical treatment by her husband’s family and
almost died.

For three years, the woman had not called her family back home in Cambodia
“because I didn’t want my mother to worry,” and because she felt ashamed she
hadn’t been able to send any money home.

Eventually, though, she called her brother. Together they convinced the Chinese
family to let her visit her sick mother in Cambodia — but they let her go only on
the condition she leave her daughter behind.

Now she lives in a cruel limbo. Scared of being stigmatized in her village, she
rarely goes home, working instead for low pay in a garment factory on the
outskirts of Phnom Penh.

She has been separated from her 3-year-old daughter for more than a year.

Thinking of her, a fleeting smile passes over her face.

“I cry every day,” she said.

With men outnumbering women in China by 34 million, the demand for foreign
wives risks simply shifting the problem onto China’s smaller neighbors.

Russian women, some of whom used to look to the West for husbands, are
increasingly seeking marriage in China, says Elena Barabantseva at Britain’s
University of Manchester, who has been leading an international project on
marriage migration into China.

In China, they are the most sought-after brides, prized for their fair skin and
European features. They are seen as educated but accessible, less emancipated

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than Western women. These women are more likely to end up in bigger cities,
with richer men.

Commercial marriage tours to Russia as well as Ukraine offer Chinese men the
chance to meet 10 or 20 women over the space of a few days for around $5,000,
rising to $8,000 if they find a bride.

But a much larger number of women come from Vietnam. Marriage migration
across the porous border in southern China began two decades ago and is
flourishing, said Caroline Grillot, who has been researching the phenomenon for a
decade, most recently with Barabantseva in Manchester.

Vietnamese women are seen as less “demanding” than some Chinese women and
more focused on traditional family values. They are also sought after for their fair
skin, their big eyes and slim waists, Grillot says. They in turn often prefer Chinese
husbands to their own compatriots, not just for their wallets, but because they are
seen as hard-working and family-focused.

Today websites like ZhongYueLove.com (China-Viet-Love) offer a selection of

Vietnamese women. Some services offer a money-back guarantee that the brides
will be virgins, and a free replacement for any who run away within a year.

Others arrive from Burma and Laos, crossing into China’s relatively poor
southwestern Yunnan province.

In effect they are replacing local women who have themselves migrated, to find
husbands in more prosperous parts of “inner China,” said Shen Hanmei, a
professor at Yunnan University in Kunming.

Significant numbers have poured in from North Korea, too, especially after
famine struck there in the mid-1990s. Many have suffered horrendous treatment
from abusive husbands or were trafficked into prostitution in China, and ended
up in labor camps if they tried to return to their home country.

Taking a stand over harassment

‘Locked in their fist’

‘There’s too many men’

First the girls refused to go to class. Then they launched a sit-in in the center of
town. Then they stopped eating.

A group of 11-graders in the Indian village of Gothra Tappa Dahina sparked a

public revolt because they were tired of being harassed by men as they walked to
school in a neighboring town. Nearly every day on the road, they said, they would
be circled by young men buzzing them on motorbikes, grabbing their scarves,
their bodies, and calling them sexually provocative names.

Street harassment — called “eve teasing” here — has long been a problem in
Indian society, which remains deeply patriarchal despite years of economic
growth and superficial signs of change. Now, the widening imbalance between
numbers of men and women in the country is exacerbating the problem, public
safety officials believe.

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This conservative part of northern India has 7,000 villages with as many as 150 to
200 surplus single men each, one study said. In a country all too familiar with
crimes against women, packs of men, fueled by cheap local liquor, often take to
the street to chase and pressure young women.

From left: Nikita Chauhan, Sheetal Chauhan and Jyoti Chauhan, all 14, protested
to continue their education in the village school to avoid come-ons from men on
their walk to a distant school. The girls are not related. (Poras Chaudhary/For The
Washington Post)

Ultimately the girls decided to take matters into their own hands.

“There’s too many men,” said Nikita Chauhan, 14, the willowy daughter of the
village seamstress who became a protest leader. “They keep us locked in their
fist.”

Last May, amid blackened, burned-over farmers’ fields and in the scorching heat,
the girls gathered under a printed cotton tent in the center of the village and
began their strike.

The temperatures soared to 107 degrees. Some fainted and had to be taken to the
hospital. Some passed out and lay as they were, fanned by fellow students, who
spooned water laced with electrolyte powder into their mouths, like baby birds.
They were joined by the mayor, their mothers, then women from other villages.

A month earlier, the girls had graduated from the village school to high school
and began experiencing what their older sisters had long warned them about —
that the 1.5-mile stretch of road between their village and the high school was not
safe, because of the young men on motorcycles — with helmets obscuring their
faces — who harassed them as they walked.

“I decided whatever I had experienced during those days wasn’t worth tolerating,”
said Sujata Chauhan, 14, sitting near the protest site. (The girls are not related —
Chauhan is a common last name among the local caste.)

Gothra Tappa Dahina village is a small community of nearly 3,000, mostly

farming families who grow corn, wheat and millet. It is part of a district that has
one of the worst boy-girl ratios in Haryana, an economically strong but socially
backward state which itself has the worst gender ratio of newborns to age 6 in the
country, according to census data. Crimes against women have risen in the state
by 127 percent in the last decade.

The imbalance of men to women in the village tells the story — there are 133 men
to every 100 women, according to community health statistics.

During hot, sleepy days, the men in the village play rummy on the front porch of
the community center, their backs to the painted “Girl Boy Board” where
community health workers have tallied the sex of newborns, monitoring done as
part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “Save Girl Child, Educate Girl Child”
program, which carries out public awareness campaigns on the importance of
caring for and educating girls. Modi launched the program after India’s ratio of
boys to girls (newborns to age 6) widened significantly between the census of
2001 and that of 2011.

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Those who admit to “eve-teasing” say that it is harmless. Sometimes the girls flirt
back or encourage it, they say.

Suresh Chauhan, the sarpanch, or mayor, of Gothra Tappa Dahina. He says

education is helping advance women’s causes. (Poras Chaudhary/For The
Washington Post)

College student Shakti Singh, 20, said he would like a girlfriend but has no clue
how to get one.

With little help from their conservative parents but with easy access to the
Internet, he and his friends model their behavior on the swains in Bollywood
romance movies. The genre — often with a hero who breaks down a woman’s
reluctance — has been criticized for glorifying stalking and rape.

“There is a lot of effect from movies,” Singh said. “Even though the girl says no he
continues chasing her, and she still says no. But in the end he gets the girl.”

Now multiply that impression by the several million unattached young men
watching these movies nationwide. The state recently launched a program to
curtail these misguided “Romeos,” with special police squads to patrol shopping
malls, college campuses and bus stands where chronic harassers gather.

“I won’t tease in the village. I will get beaten up. But outside I do,” boasted Lal
Singh, a field worker, 31.

In Gothra village, the girls’ sit-in finally notched a small victory.

After eight days, school officials — worn down by seeing the wilting girls on cable
news as the protest garnered attention — announced that the girls’ demands
would be met. They would open 11th and 12th grades in the existing village school
so the girls would not have to walk.

It was a victory that did little to discipline the harassing young men, and one that
will liberate the girls by keeping them closer to home — but a victory, nonetheless.

Suresh Chauhan — the local sarpanch, or mayor, who sat in the heat with the girls
throughout the protest — says that education is the key to undoing what decades
of patriarchy in India have wrought.

“The change is in the younger generation. People look at each other and change
themselves,” he said. There is some shift due to wider worlds glimpsed on
television and smartphones, he said, but “education is the highest reason for
change.”

A few days later, the 11-graders, flush with victory, lined up to await the start of
classes at their school — a horseshoe-shaped ring of spare concrete rooms, some
without desks.

“Until we were at the hunger strike, we did not realize how progressive our village
had become. How supportive they were. How they think now! Now, we are not
restricted at all,” Sujata Chauhan said. “People have come to realize that we have
equal rights and they are willing to give them to us.”

Swati Gupta in New Delhi and Luna Lin and Shirley Feng in Beijing contributed

20 of 21 4/21/2018, 6:09 AM
In China and India, men outnumber women on a massive scale. The consequences are far-reaching.

to this report.

Design and development by Jason Bernert, Joe Moore and Brianna Schroer.
Graphics by Chris Alcantara, Tim Meko and Leslie Shapiro. Animations by
Osman Malik. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent.

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21 of 21 4/21/2018, 6:09 AM