NEW DELHI, March 8 (APP) India has the lowest percentage of femalepopulation in the Asia-Pacific region, a UNDP report released here on Monday said.China and India together account more than 85 million of the nearly 100 million “missing” women estimated to have died from discriminatory treatment in health care, nutrition access or pure neglect or because they were never born in the first place, the report titled power, Voice and Rights said.

The problem of “missing girls” in which more boys are born than girls, as girl fetuses are presumably aborted, and women die from health and nutrition neglect  is actually growing.

India also has 42.7 million women who were missing in the year 2007 and the mean age at marriage is 20 for women and 25 for men.

According to the report India had 48.2 per cent female population at birth, Pakistan 48.5, Bangladesh 48.8 and Japan 51.1 per cent.

The sex ratio at birth in India was 1.08. The comparative figure was 1.05 for Pakistan, 1.04 for Bangladesh and 1.05 for Nepal, the reports said.

India has 0.3 per cent of its people in the age group of 15-49 vulnerable to HIV/AIDS.

The report which was released by Helen Clarke, former New Zealand Prime Minister and Administrator UNDP said, the report again shows that six out of ten of the world’s poorest people are women. Women are still subject to violence.

Referring to India, Helen Clarke said that the country presents a mixed picture. While the government shows exceptional commitment to the cause of women’s development, the situation on the ground is quite different.

In South Asian countries like India and Pakistan fewer than 35 percent of women do paid work. These contrasts in women’s paid work between East and South Asia co-exist in parallel with the higher long-term growth trend of the former.

Despite laws guaranteeing equal pay for equal work, women in this region still earn considerably less than men, with the pay gap ranging from 54 to 90 percent, the report said.