Abstract
Over one million girls in India are married off before they turn 15 years of age, and more than four hundred thousand among them bear children. This article aims to identify and locate regionally the youngest cohort of child brides and adolescent mothers. It seeks to highlight the associated complexities and challenges of this feature in the country using Census of India, 2011 data. The analysis shows that, at first level, this phenomenon represents in a broad east-west regional pattern; in the second level of disaggregation, it emerges in rural Rajasthan and urban parts of Gujarat and Maharashtra and, in the third level, it emerges in particular pockets like Bhilwara, Ajmer, Chittaurgarh, Tonk, Ahmedabad, Kheda and Gandhinagar. This article shows that the incidence of the phenomenon of child brides does not reflect a clear linkage with the regional location of population groups such as north India or rural India. The popular characterisation of this feature on regional lines fails to spot its incidence across the country and undermines the gravity of the issue in almost every district.
Introduction
According to UNICEF, child marriage and pregnancy-related complications are important determinants of mortality among girls aged 15–19 years across the globe, contributing to thousands of deaths each year. Besides the damage to the body, mind and society that child marriage is capable of causing, it clearly violates the rights of children—both boys and girls; however, girls are more vulnerable than boys. 1
Child marriage is a deterrent in achieving progress for any nation, and its eradication as a basic societal and human need is critical. There has been a significant decline, of about 20 per cent 2 , of women (aged 20–24 years) married before 18 years of age. There is, however, still a long way to go for a country which was the highest contributor to absolute numbers of child brides in the world as of 2013 (Goli, 2016). In India, about 27 per cent girls get married off before the age of 18 and 7 per cent before they reach 15 years of age. 3
According to the Census of India (2011), 11,229,274 girls aged 15–19 years and 1,812,200 girls aged less than 15 years at the time of enumeration were found ‘ever married’ (currently married, widowed, divorced or separated). Given these numbers, and the fact that the pace of decline has been noticeably low in the age group of 15–18 years (
Literature Review
According to the Law of the land, a child in the context of marriage refers to any boy below 21 years of age and any girl below 18 years of age. The marriage is termed ‘child marriage’ if any of the two parties has not attained the prescribed age, thereby making it voidable.
Every child marriage, whether solemnised before or after the commencement of this Act (The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006) shall be voidable at the option of the contracting party who was a child at the time of the marriage: Provided that a petition for annulling a child marriage by a decree of nullity may be filed in the district court only by a contracting party to the marriage who was a child at the time of the marriage. (
Therefore, the onus essentially lies with the guardians and the parents, most importantly.
alongside the legal measures, investment in community-based programmes and services is essential. It is the parents of the girls, community elders and religious authority figures who need to be made aware and convinced of the risks posed by child marriage as well as about the advantages of educating the girl child while delaying the age of marriage. (EPW editorials, 2009, p. 7)
This is largely because ‘education is the strongest determinant of the age at marriage for females’ (Srinivasan et al, 2015, p. 38).
In case the marriage is declared void, the girl child involved in the marriage has the right to maintenance. Given the patrilocality that India so strongly sanctifies, the residence of the girl is another important decision the district court needs to take.
Premature pregnancy and consequent childbirth are not just damaging to the child or the children involved in the marriage but the children born as a result of the same. According to the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, 5 if child marriage is reported and taken to the court, and if there are children born out of those marriages, then though the marriage is voidable, but the legitimacy of the child born is upheld, and a suitable decision regarding the custody needs to be taken by the court.
Therefore, untimely marriages and untimely childbirths, given the overarching structures of patriarchy, patrilocality and differential roles played by men and women in a marriage push children towards unexplained depths of societal and bodily exploitations.
Historical Context
In an article published in 1953, Dube critically writes:
It is well known that Manu, the supreme lawgiver of the Hindus, whose code still governs the fundamental structure of Hindu Society, prescribed that a girl should be married before the commencement of her menstruation and child marriage has for long been a feature of Hindu socio-religious life. (Dube, 1953, p. 19)
A study by Agarwala (1957) (see Figure 1) shows that, historically, the lowest mean age at marriage prevailed among the Hindus.
Presently (see Figure 2), Hindus rank fourth, after Jains, Buddhists and Sikhs in terms of their contribution towards child marriage among girls less than 15 years of age. Muslims contribute less than Hindus and Christians even lesser.
The following map (see Figure 3) shows the mean age at marriage that prevailed in India almost a century ago, where the mean age was least in Hyderabad at 11.35 years. In most places, 12 years was the age at which girls were married off, and 15 years was the highest or close to the highest age unmarried girls attained before being married off. It was a possible cause of concern for the Indian society in the past. Fifteen years of age is the lowest or close to the lowest age at which girls are married off in present day and, hopefully, continues to be a point of concern for the present society as well, but for absolutely contrasting reasons. This journey has been a steadily progressive and, consequently, reformative one (see Figure 4), except for the year 1931 (which was a time of demographic deviations for various reasons), when India managed to keep the mean age at marriage above the legally set minimum marriageable age. Times have immensely changed, but there is still a lot that needs attention and rectification.
Objective
This article is an attempt to locate the concentration of girls married early and to identify those regions in the country that are contributing to this twin problem of untimely marriages and premature motherhood.
Database and Methodology
The younger the age, the worse the case; drawing from the severity of the problem, only girls below 15 years of age have been taken into consideration. The attempt was to look at the bigger picture, that is, the way this problem is plaguing the nation as a whole and, subsequently, identifying pockets of concentration. A lack of understanding of the institution of marriage, mental trauma, financially crippling, overall helplessness, responsibility burden, dropping out of education, sexual-marital performance pressure and the health hazards are damaging for the autonomy and agency of a child aged 14 years or below. It was essential to include every reported case, everywhere, as the numbers were less in the age group of less than 15 years, yet existent in every region of the country. The Census was selected as the data-base (F-series, table numbers: 2011-F05-India-State-Distt-V4-MDDS, 2011-F06-India-State-Distt-V4-MDDS and 2011-F07-India-State-Distt-V4-MDDS), rather than just a sample, though the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 3 and 4 have been referred to substantiate explanations. Another reason for choosing the Census is the fact that it provides information on the incidence of child marriage for boys and girls, rather than the prevalence rate as provided by NFHS. Also, the Census provides data on current marital status (currently married, widowed, divorced, separated and never married) by current age and marital duration, which is a more powerful indicator than the prevalence rate for ever-married women aged between 15 and 49 years old and men aged between 15 and 54 years, as provided by the District Level Household Survey (DLHS) (Young Lives Policy Brief, 2017, pp 1–2). Data on child sex ratio, adult literacy rate, female literacy rate, SC and ST population was accessed from the Primary Census Abstract, Census of India, 2011, and percentage of population below poverty line was accessed from the website of the Reserve Bank of India. 6 There are several existing studies that report on the same issue using the same dataset, but they have all focussed on the conventional age limit of 18 years. This article suggests focussing on girls in the lowest age group with greater concern, as they incur higher risks for both themselves and society.
Location quotient has been used as a measure of concentration, as it provides the relative position of a smaller region (a state or a district in this case) with respect to a larger region it is located within (the country or a state) and, therefore, has the advantage of ignoring absolute differences.
Where values greater than 1 means over concentration with respect to the national or state average in case of a state or a district, respectively, and values less than 1 means under concentration and values equal to 1 means equal incidence at both levels.
To calculate ‘concentration of child brides below 15 years’, ‘total population of girls below 15 years’ has been taken as the universe, and to calculate ‘concentration of mothers below 15 years’, ‘total married girls below 15 years’ has been taken as the universe. Though non-marital pregnancy could also be a possibility, more likely than not, in the Indian context, reported childbirth is a consequence of marriage.
Karl Pearson’s product moment correlation coefficient has been used to identify the significant causes of child marriage. Choropleth mapping has been used to identify regions of similar concentrations of the problem. Some maps have been superimposed to correlate the phenomena.
Results and Discussion
Marriage is possibly the most sanctified institution in India, so much so that:
Virtually all Indian men and women get married. Census data (2001) shows that less than 2% of men and 1% of women remain unmarried and the mean age at marriage for women is still below 20 [and] 95% of women are married by age 25. Indeed, most women marry between the ages 14 and 25, with a particular tight clustering between ages 17 and 19, showing far less dispersion than observed in other societies. (Desai & Andrist, 2010, p. 675)
This implies that parents wait for their daughters to reach the legal marriageable age before marrying them off. This hurry is triggered by the perception of ‘rising cost of dowry or the decreasing value of bride wealth that results as a girl ages … moreover the high value placed on female virginity … the sooner she is married, the sooner she is saved from non-marital sexual activity or a non-marital pregnancy’ (Lee-Rife, Malhotra, Warner & Glinski, 2012, p. 528).
From over one million girls below the age of 15 years, who had entered the most sanctified institution, about three hundred thousand such girls belonged to the state of Uttar Pradesh, another two hundred thousand from Maharashtra and over one hundred thousand from the states of Bihar and Rajasthan each. And these are only the reported cases. The numbers may seem more numerically obvious because these are few of the largest and populous states of the country.
A Pan-Indian Problem?
In an attempt to map the gender on geography, more often than not, scholars have reasserted the popularly perceived notion of the north-south divide, whereby the north of India has been found worse off as compared to the south of India.
‘Bina Agarwal (1994, 372–376) finds this trend in her analysis of the purdah practice, gender, land and labour relations, inheritance of land by widows and endogamy and marriage norms in her own study and writes about ‘Sopher’s (1980) proposed north-south separation of India’s historical-cultural regions’, ‘Mandelbaum’s (1970) north-south division…in the institutions of marriage and family and the status of women’ and ‘Libbee’s (1980) mapping of territorial endogamy and marriage distance [that] suggests a marked difference between the peninsular south and the northwest’. Kolenda (1984) in her article titled ‘Woman as Tribute, Woman as Flower: Images of ‘Woman’ in Weddings in North and South India’ contrasts North Indian Rajput and South Indian Nattati Nadar weddings to conclude differences within the umbrella of South Asian weddings. In a book titled, ‘Doing Gender Doing Geography’, a north–south trend emerges when a correlation between sex ratio at birth and adverse mortality for daughters was researched (Hassan, 2011, p. 186). And lastly, as seen in Figure 3 (Agarwala, 1957, p. 102), the southern block of India clearly emerges as a distinct region that married off girls at a higher age as compared to its counterparts. Interestingly, more often than not, this trend emerged when an intersection between women and marriage was the question of concern.
The north–south trend, however, does not hold true in case of marriages among children less than the age of 15 years today (see Figure 5). Instead, an east–west pattern emerges in this context. Maharashtra tops the list, very closely followed by Rajasthan. This problem, therefore, cannot be explained along with the conventional north–south kind of dichotomous perception, but the article also does not endorse an alternative east–west kind of regionalisation. Instead, it urges one to look beyond the broad regionalisation in India, at least with respect to this problem.
Rural–Urban Divide: Myth or Reality?
The problem of child marriage (for girls less than 15 years of age) in India seems to be shrouded in more myths than realities. It is more prevalent in urban areas as compared to the rural, though in the case of child brides aged 15–19 years, the rural surpasses the urban (see Table 1). The urban tends to protrude out in the five major states where the problem has the highest concentration, with Rajasthan being the only exception, as evident from Figure 6. This article agrees with an existing study, which also ‘dismisses the existing myth that child marriage is only a ‘rural and lower socio-economic’ phenomenon and emphasizes that a significant number of child marriages occur in the urban areas and among the higher socio-economic groups’ (Goli, 2016, p. 33).
Causes and Comparisons
What is intriguing is the fact that almost contrasting patterns are generated when girls below 15 are considered a separate cohort, as compared to some of the existing studies which have considered girls below 18 years as the target group. Rajasthan, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Tripura and Andhra Pradesh have been identified as the seven high-focus states by the ActionAid study (Goli, 2016, p. 31). Five out these seven states lie to the east of India. This study identifies Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Goa, Gujarat and Punjab as the top five states, all of which lie to the west of India. The states identified in this study are in sync with the Young Lives and National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) report (Young Lives Policy Brief, 2017, p. 2) that identifies states like Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa and West Bengal with highest incidences, along with the western Union Territories (UTs). The NFHS (2015–2016) reported that the percentage of women aged 18–29 years, who were married exactly at the age of 18 was the highest in Bihar (41.9), followed by Jharkhand (39.2), Andhra Pradesh (36.2) and Madhya Pradesh (33.0). This looks like another hurdle on the way—the lack of agreement among some of the pioneering studies in identifying the exact location of the problem and zeroing down on their exact causes, given the nation-wide prevalence of the problem and its causes.
To ask what leads a girl child to this menace, citing the World Bank, Desai and Andrist (2010, p. 679) write:
Regional differences in income, education, and culture dominate the Indian panorama; age at marriage is no exception. Studies documenting these interstate differences often note that these differences are so robust that the additions of individual-level socio-economic controls do little to dampen the differences between states.
Therefore, states with similar socio-economic structures, or states carved out of one another, adjoining states are likely to paint similar pictures (Desai & Andrist, 2010, p. 680) whereas the ActionAid study argues that there is a ‘lack of strong correlation between the proportion of child marriage and socio-economic factors across the states [which] suggests that regional variations in the prevalence of child marriage cannot be explained through socio-economic factors alone’ (Goli, 2016, p. 33). This study argues that child marriage among girls with less than 15 years of age is not one of those issues that pertain to a particular region in India, under the garb of a certain kind of societal arrangement always. However, child sex ratio emerges to be an important social factor that does show a clear regional linkage with child marriage, and statistically, literacy, especially female literacy, shows a significant correlation (see Figure 7 and Table 3).
This study, therefore, seeks attention outside of established perceptions. It found that even if people belonging to certain socio-economic categories like below poverty line or SCs and STs, or spatial groups such as north India or rural India do not show sufficient linkage, but similar social problems like low child sex ratio and illiteracy do show strong regional and statistical linkages, respectively. However, there is no denial about the fact that there are incidences of marriage among girls aged 14 years or less in every district of this country (see Figure 15). Therefore, assigning a regional character possibly takes away from the gravity of the issue.
Adolescent Motherhood: The Consequence
In societies like India, an almost uncontested popular understanding is that marriage essentially is for procreation. In an environment like this, young married girls will not be spared for very long before they are pushed into being adolescent mothers soon after being pushed into child marriage.
Many of the eastern states surpass the western states in this context (see Figure 8). Quite intriguingly, two states from the Northeast India—Assam and Tripura—rank at the top, with Manipur not being too far. West Bengal is also in the running with Uttar Pradesh, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh—all from the eastern half of the country this time. Gujarat, along with its neighbouring UTs, retains representation from the west. This mismatch in regional representation yet again calls for a nation-wide examination of the problem across caste-tribe-east-west boundaries and identification of the conviction in this practice among all Indians.
Youngest Indian Mothers
Age 15 is of significance for another very important reason which is, according to demographic understanding, a watershed that marks the start of the reproductive age. According to the understanding from the medical sciences, in this part of the world, girls attain menarche normally by 12–13 years of age, thereby making them marriage and procreation fit.
Though the data available does not provide the minimum age at which girls in this country bear children, but indirectly, it can be established as 12 years. The maximum number of living children reported is two, with no state reporting even a single instance of three living children. Also, less than 15 years of age implies that the maximum age included is 14 years, and two children would mean around 18 months of pregnancy; therefore, the youngest mothers in this country are possibly aged between 12 and 12 and a half years, an age when girls, by need and by right, are expected to be in the sixth standard of school education. The same states again emerge as home to the youngest mothers in India (see Figure 9).
Burden of Child Birth
Child burden is a multifaceted concern; it is as much sociological as it is physical and psychological. A girl child aged just 14, when forced to mother up to two children, the maximum she can reproduce at her age, automatically encounters a plethora of complexities she finds herself most incapable of handling. At large, it takes an insensitive society towards further insensitivities, gender inequalities and social injustices that find fewer possibilities of correcting themselves, despite any number of pro-girl children policies. The counter blows must lie in active de-sanctification of untimely marriage and criminalisation of forced child burden.
Here (see Figure 10), states like Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Uttarakhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura are those states where the incidence of marriage before 15 years of age could be low, but for all those girls married off, the chances of premature pregnancy are high. For states like Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh, both are high. Rajasthan is high on the former and low on the latter.
The broad mismatch in the regional pattern of untimely marriages, and untimely pregnancies reveals that the chances of falling prey to child marriage are higher in the western part of the country, but given the frequency of the phenomena, the number of girls without or yet to bear children is also higher whereas in the eastern states, though lesser girls are likely to encounter child marriage, once married, they are more likely to become mothers.
Issues of Adolescent Motherhood
In India, millions of girls are forced to skip the biological transition between childhood and adulthood, thereby pushing them into a world of medical abnormalities through the consequences of child marriage and adolescent motherhood. The regular ‘sexual abuse’ and to ‘bear children when her body is not prepared for pregnancy’ leads to irreparable bodily damage (Will child marriages ever end?, 2013, p. 9). According to the 65th World Health Assembly’s report (2012, p. 3) on ‘Early marriages, adolescent and young pregnancies’, the combined consequences are ‘dangerous’ to both young mothers and their newborns; ‘the younger the mother, the higher the risk. The rates of preterm birth, low birth weight and asphyxia are higher among the children of adolescent girls’. ‘Girls under 15 are five times more likely to die during pregnancy and childbirth than women in their twenties’ (Balasubramaniam, 2013, p. 998). The process is detrimental for the nation as well because early pregnancies imply higher overall fertility rates.
Real Problem Pockets
The objective behind identifying smaller zones is not to deviate from the argument that the problem needs a national approach but only to identify locations where the practice is more rampant than elsewhere. A rural-urban type breakup did hint at locations like rural Rajasthan and urban parts of Gujarat and Maharashtra as some of the plagued zones. In fact, this huge western region comprising three very industrious states of the country emerges extremely intriguing. This has, therefore, been identified as the zone of concern (see Figure 11), without denying the nation-wide incidence of the problem.
However, this is a very broad zone as well, especially because it involves some of the largest states.
In fact, more often than not, these kinds of social crimes are carried out so much under the cover, despite the existence of such commonplace laws that a village-level study is possibly most suited (as found by Balasubramaniam (2013) for Tamil Nadu and Ghosh (2011) for West Bengal among many others). However, that would miss out on the big picture, which essentially is the aim of this study.
Therefore, the next step was to identify smaller pockets. Within the zone of concern, areas like Bhilwara, Ajmer, Chittaurgarh, Tonk and Ahmedabad emerged as zones of further concern (see Figure 12). The state of Maharashtra though does not reveal any specific pocket, yet it is an important player as well. This is because it is the state where child brides less than 15 years of age have the highest concentration and that, in fact, is the root cause of the problem, everything else follows.
The states of Gujarat and Rajasthan require specific discussion. For Gujarat, areas of high concentration of child marriage coincide with a high concentration of premature motherhood whereas the opposite is true for Rajasthan state (see Figures 13 and 14).
Further, the state of Gujarat seems to be a real problem zone, with the highest concentration of 12 years old youngest mothers, the highest concentration of maximum number of children per married girl of less than 15 years of age, the third highest in terms of the concentration of adolescent mothers of less than age 15 and the fourth highest in terms of the concentration of untimely married girls, as early as less than 15 years of age. And just to recall, urban Gujarat seems more problematic than rural Gujarat. Therefore, it is important to note the areas (like Ahmedabad, Kheda and Gandhinagar) within Gujarat that are contributing to this problem and are pushing the state towards an extremely exploitative, gender and child-insensitive future, thereby negating all glories otherwise achieved.
Second, the state of Rajasthan comes across as a rather confusing one. It ranks second, very closely following Maharashtra in terms of girls married off before they attained age 15 years, with rural Rajasthan appearing more problematic than urban Rajasthan. But in terms of the concentration of mothers below 15 years of age, number of children per mother of less than 15 years of age and the concentration of youngest mothers, that is, mothers aged approximately 12 to 12 and a half years, Rajasthan is positioned last, after all the states and all the UTs in India. The reasons could be multiple. On a slightly positive note, a popular practice in rural Rajasthan is to hold back the girls after marriage in the paternal home and send her to the matrimonial home only after she has attained 18 years of age in order to retain both legality and tradition. The more negative possibility could be an extremely low age of marriage whereby motherhood is a medical impossibility. Also, as the Young Lives and NCPCR report (Young Lives Policy Brief, 2017, p. 2) brings out, Rajasthan is also a state with the highest incidence of child marriage among boys as well; therefore, the age gap between the groom and the bride in a marriage may not be huge, which could be another cause for low incidence of adolescent motherhood. This fact exposes the startling reality that child brides in some other parts of the country could be facing a huge age gap with their husbands since the incidence of child marriage is way lesser among boys. This abnormal age gap itself could be a grave problem leading to several socio-medical issues for young married girl children.
For Further In-depth Research and Policy Concerns
An attempt has been made in this study to identify critical areas (see Figure 15) where researchers and other social, legal and medical contributors need to look closely for child brides and untimely mothers and associated problems thereafter, without keeping any prejudices regarding social structures therein. An analysis of educational level across different age-sex categories in the high concentration regions can be a significant area for further research. India has to ensure legal and bodily safety of young children, both boys and girls. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, 1948 advocates consensual marriage and thereby declares zero legality to marriages below the specified age. Therefore, prevention is the key. Yet, in this country, currently a million cases exist, and therefore, the law needs to ensure the protection of child rights, especially when such a marriage is declared null and void and when there are children born out of such marriages.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the Indian Council for Social Science Research for offering me a postdoctoral fellowship and Banaras Hindu University, my affiliate institution, for providing access to data, books and other resources. I would like to thank Dr Sarfaraz Alam for generously agreeing to guide me through this process. I shall always be grateful to Jawaharlal Nehru University, especially the Centre for the Study of Regional Development and Professor B. S. Butola for everything. I would also like to thank the reviewers of this journal for their valuable comments and suggestions which have helped in improving the quality of this article.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.