The union government on December 15 decided to raise the legal age of marriage for women from 18 to 21 years. The age for men to legally marry in India is already 21. Although the recently released National Family Health Survey ( NFHS) has revealed that child marriage has gone down substantially from 27% in 2015-16 to 23% in 2019-20. But the goal is to push it down further.
The minimum age limit to marry was set initially to stop child marriages and to prevent the abuse of minors. Although the laws for various religions are different, the goal is the safety of women across the country. The Hindu law for marriage which is guided by The Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, sets 18 years for the woman and 21 for the men, whereas in Islam, anyone who has attained puberty can marry and that would be considered valid.
The Special Marriage Act,1954 and The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 prescribe the legal age of marriage for a man and woman is 21 and 18 years respectively.
The current government has decided to reconsider the legal age of marriage for women for several reasons, mostly to promote gender neutrality. The consequences of early marriage can result in early pregnancy which affects the nutritional level of mothers and their children. It also increases the Infant Mortality Rate ( IMR) and the Maternal Mortality Rate ( MMR). This prevents women from being empowered and more often than not, they are cut from all the access to education. The quality of life is also severely affected after an early marriage.
The Jaya Jaitly Committee which was set up in June 2020 by the Ministry for Women and Child Development set up a task force to find the correlation between the age of marriage with issues of women’s nutrition, the prevalence of anemia, IMR, MMR, and other social indices.
It was also asked to look into the feasibility of increasing the minimum age of marriage for women. The committee headed by former Samata Party president Jaya Jaitly recommended the age to be increased to 21 years based on the feedback received from young adults from 16 universities all over the country. The feedback received had input from all religions as well as from rural and urban areas equally. An awareness campaign was also recommended on a massive scale to encourage social acceptance of the increased age of marriage which would be more effective than forcefully implementing the amended law.
Critics of the law who are child and women’s rights activists have cited that this might push a major part of the population towards illegal marriages. Child marriages have not been eradicated even when the age was 18 years for women. This law can be seen as coercive and can impact the marginalized committees, especially the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes.
This law was long overdue, but it has to be implemented in a way that is accepted by most people in the country. Coercive measures have to be taken against child marriages. There are a ton of laws in theory but merely passing a law will not ensure the implementation. Although data suggests that child marriages have gone down, but that was before pandemic which brings to light the rooted issues of poverty which is directly related to the early marriages of women. The creation of jobs specifically for low-income families, access to schooling, and promoting gender neutrality in letter and spirit is the only way towards a better future for the women of the country.
