GS Paper I

News Excerpt:

Child marriage is prevalent in India according to a study published in the Lancet Global Health that showed stalled progress.

Significance of the studies and observations by the Lancet Global Health:

• Most studies in the past have ignored child marriages among boys, which has a direct bearing on reducing child marriages among girls in the Indian context. 
  • A deep-rooted societal norm prevailing in most parts of the country is that a bride needs to be younger by age than the potential groom. 
  • This practice can be corroborated by the median age at first marriage for men and women in the age group 25–49 years being 24·9 years for men and 19·2 years for women, reported by the National Family Health Survey (2019–21).
  • The study has also made a sincere effort to provide child marriage headcounts for girls and boys.
• It not only helps policy makers, advocates, and implementers to set the future requirement for multi sectoral investment in the programs associated with the elimination of child marriages, but also a potential source of absolute and relative assessments of child marriage burden across states and Union Territories and the selected socio-demographic backgrounds.

Government Interventions for preventing Child marriages: India had started legal intervention much before the cognizance of the current international commitments to tackle child marriage.

• In 1929, the Imperial Legislative Council of earlier British India passed the Child Marriage Restraint Act to curb child marriages, which was amended later on several occasions in independent India. 
• In 1978, the amendment to the act fixed the minimum legal age at marriage for girls to 18 years and boys to 21 years. 
• In 2006, the act was renamed as the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, and has punishable provisions in case of its violation. It also empowers the state to curb child marriages through community sensitization and awareness policies and programs.
• Regarding the variation in the effective implementation of the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act in the context of highly diversified socio-cultural milieu, norms, and practices associated with marriage, studies in the past have documented tremendous intra-state and inter-state variation in the child marriage rates.

How this issue of Child Marriage can be refined according to the Lancet? (Way Forward)

The future research measuring the child marriage problem requires further refinement on two necessary fronts. 

• Need to think on Indicators of the measuring criteria:

• • The indicator of the proportion of women aged 20–24 years married before 18 years and men aged 23–27 years married before 21 years is neither an accurate period measure nor a robust cohort measure to capture the most recent progress. 
  • Although the indicator is aptly chosen by the authors given that it is readily available for most counties and potentially can measure the SDG target. 
  • There could be several reasons why the denominator of this indicator might shrink or increase for a particular cohort of women and men. 
  • Hence, the prevalence of child marriage in that study population could appear higher than its actual level, or vice-versa. 

• The decline in child marriage might not be a true reflection of a change:

• • The reports showed that the prevalence of child marriage had declined in India between 1993 and 2021.
    • The other front, which has severe repercussions for protecting human rights, is the participation in mate selection. In 2011–12, as high as two-fifths of women (aged 15–49 years) in India did not participate in mate selection in their marriage. 
  • The forced or unconsented marriage indication at any age is a serious issue from the human rights perspective that must be factored in while measuring the severity of child marriage burden in future studies. 

Mains PYQs

Q. Examine the main provisions of the National Child Policy and throw light on the status of its implementation. (UPSC 2016)