11. See Kathlean Gough (1959) for example in order to experience regional variation in women’s freedom even within the same religious group, here Hindu, in Kerala: “[In Cochin] a woman might have sex or eight husbands of her own or a higher sub-caste, and a man, any number of Nayar wives of his own or lower sub-caste.”
12. We have tested many different model specifications but reported only those which included highly significant regressors and passed the F-tests with high values of adjusted R2. Given the cross section nature of the data set, values of adjusted R2 are found to be too high to ignore the role of the indicators chosen by us. Interested readers may consult the correlation matrices reported in Table 7 and 8. Note that the dissggregated information of religion at the district level helped us get enormous negative role played by various religious communities on gender equality, which is deep-rooted in the social process. We must confess that there is no political motivation in our attempt at testing the consequence of religious faith on the sex ratio. We would consider ourselves successful if further investigation is initiated in this regard.
