Surprising trends in child marriages

Surprising trends in child marriages

The 2015-16 edition of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS), one of the world’s most comprehensive collections of data related to health, well-being, marital status, childbirth and many other parameters relevant to sensible policymaking, provides surprising insights into the practice of child marriage — girls between 15 and 18 who are married off by families. With the exception of Himachal Pradesh and Manipur, every state has reported a fall in the number of child brides from the 2005-06 survey, a pan-India drop from 29% to 11.9%. This is welcome: the later a child marries, the lower the probability of teenage pregnancy, and higher the chances of continued education, and social and economic empowerment.

By and large, most logical factors related to the incidence of child marriage tally with the NFHS data: kids from poorer families tend to get married off earlier, urban India fares better than villages, and the higher the level of education, the lower the incidence of child marriage. The devil in the detail is this: while some states like Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and Haryana with low social indicators have managed to reduce the incidence of child marriage by substantial levels in 10 years, others like Gujarat, Maharashtra, Manipur and West Bengal have progressed slower than one would expect.

The reason for this divergence across states is unclear: Manipur and West Bengal have far better sex-ratios (the number of women per 1,000 men and a pointer to gender equality) than Maharashtra, Gujarat, Bihar, UP and Haryana. This should imply lower, not higher, incidence of child marriage. The easy way out is to say the quality of data collected varies across states; but if untrue, we have to tailor policy to even out differences in child marriage across states.