India calls first national meeting to help fight child marriage

New Delhi Alarmed at the practice of child marriages in India, the Ministry of Women and Child Development is planning to hold the first national consultation to curb the menace.

“The aim of the consultation is to discuss the problem of child marriage threadbare with state governments, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other stakeholders so that effective guidelines to tackle this social menace can be drafted,” sources in the Indian ministry told Gulf News.

The ministry has already formed a core group of officers who will be looking at all aspects of the consultation.

“The practice of child marriages continues across the country with the highest incidence in the states of Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh,” sources said.

This is happening despite a law banning child marriage, dating as far back as 1929, with subsequent amendments in 1949 and 1978. With the passage of a comprehensive Prohibition of Child Marriage Act in 2006, the National Family Health Survey 2005-06 revealed that 44.5 per cent of women between the ages of 20-24 years had been married before they turned 18.

According to the 1991 Census, the percentage of married females in the total number of females in the age group 10 to 14 was 13.2 in Rajasthan, the highest in the country. In second place was Madhya Pradesh at 8.5 per cent, followed by Uttar Pradesh at 7.1.

For the country, the percentage of married women under the age of 18 stood at 53.3 per cent. The 2001 Census showed that there were nearly 300,000 girls under the age of 15 who had given birth to at least one child, officials said.

Child marriage is prevalent in many countries around the world, but it has reached alarming heights in India, where more than one-third of all child brides in the world live.

According to Unicef data, 47 per cent of girls in India are married by the time they are 18 and 18 per cent are married off by the time they are 15 years old. These marriages are often performed without the consent of the minor girls.

Significantly, a team from The Elders, an organisation of independent global leaders working for peace and human rights, recently visited Bihar in a bid to root out the menace and seek support for the state government’s efforts to combat it.

The Elders has taken up the issue under the banner ‘Girls Not Brides’ — a global partnership initiated last year. It brings together more than 80 civil society organisations spread across five continents to tackle the problem at the grass roots, national and global levels. The delegation, comprising personalities such as Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Ela Bhatt, Gro Brundtland and Mary Robinson interacted with a group of 20 youths from the township of Masaurhi in Patna district. They said they found the interaction “most satisfying,” with the youths displaying a high degree of awareness of the risks involved in child marriage.

The delegation said their visit to the state was prompted by the fact that it had the highest rate of child marriages in the country with more than 60 per cent of the girls getting married before they are 18.

“I believe that this issue is a big hindrance to gender equality,” Archbishop Tutu, who serves as the Chair of The Elders, which was founded by Nelson Mandela in 2007, told Gulf News.

“Once a girl has had the chance to go to school and delay marriage until she is well over 18 years of age, it is unlikely that she will allow her daughter to get married at a young age. Also, women getting married before the legal age invite considerable risks to their own as well as their children’s physiology. Girls who get pregnant early are at a far higher risk of death and injury than women who give birth in their 20s,” Tutu added.