In Assam, Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s “complete war” on child marriage has led to mass arrests. But to really stop such marriages, it’s the carrot not the stick that has proven to be more useful.
The Big Story
Child marriage is India’s enduring shame. Positive interventions rather than arrests can stop it
On the first day of Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma’s “complete war” on child marriages, 1,800 people were arrested under provisions of the Prohibition of the Child Marriage act that puts the minimum age of marriage at 18 for women and 21 for men.
Those arrested included 52 qazis or priests and many arrests are reported to have been made in Muslim and Adivasi-dominated districts.
Sarma has insisted that his campaign is not directed at any one community.
India’s enduring shame
In absolute numbers, India is home to the largest number of child brides in the world with 1.5 million girls under 18 married every year, according to Unicef.
The states where the most number of child marriages take place are West Bengal, Bihar and Tripura where over 40% of girls marry before their 18th birthday, according to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data. It is also prevalent in states like Jharkhand that have a significant tribal population.
The price of child marriage is well known: Higher fertility, poor maternal and child health outcomes and the continuing denial of autonomy for girls within families. In Jharkhand where 32.2% of girls marry before they turn 18, infant mortality is 37.9%, according to NFHS-5.
The pandemic during which schools were either shut down or switched to online classes had a disproportionate impact on girls who lag in accessing digital resources like smart phones--only 16% of females, 36% of males, have internet access, according to the National Sample Survey 2017-18.
The combination of patriarchy, poverty and the pandemic proved to be too heavy a burden on many families. Between March and May 2020, Childline India, an organisation that helps children in distress, intervened in 5,333 child marriages. Given that there was a strict lockdown at the time, the number was alarming.
In its 2020 Global Girlhood Report, The Lancet, predicted 2.5 million girls worldwide were at risk of being forced into child marriage.
The good news
Child marriage saw a 20% decline in India in just a decade from 47% in 2006 to 27% in 2016, reports Unicef. Even the ravages of the pandemic could not stop the slide and in 2021, according to the National Family Health Survey-5 (NFHS-5), child marriages were down to 23.3%.
That’s still unacceptably high but proof that positive interventions work. “Access to secondary education is a silver bullet,” said Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta, additional chief secretary, panchayati raj, Karnataka.
It’s not a coincidence that child marriages have declined as educational attainment and public infrastructure, including residential schools and public transport, for children have improved.
Add to this, the many programmes to counter child marriage launched by states. In West Bengal, for instance, the Kanyashree scheme offers financial aid to girls who wish to pursue higher studies. The success of Bihar’s free cycle scheme for girls to go to school has led others like Chhattisgarh and Tripura to introduce similar schemes.
Going forward
To deal with the sticky issue of continuing child marriages, several interventions are in place or being mulled over.
One of them includes a proposal to increase the minimum age of marriage for girls from 18 to 21 to bring it at par with men.
In 2017, following recommendations made by former Supreme Court justice Shivraj Patil, Karnataka became the first state to pass an amendment that makes all marriages between minors void. The amendment prescribes a minimum punishment for those involved in such marriages, including parents, priests and even printers of invitation cards.
But mass arrests are emphatically not the answer, said child rights activist Enakshi Ganguly. “You cannot expect the poorest and most marginalised to pay the price for the lack of interventions that include reproductive and sexual health services, education, skill development, and opportunities for economic empowerment.”
Perhaps the real key to solving the problem lies in tapping the aspirations of a new generation of girls. This is a generation that wants to study, play sport and dreams of careers before marriage.
Maybe men in power should talk to these girls before arresting their parents.
(Read Naandi Foundation’s 2018 report on Teenage Girls here).
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