Minimum Age for girls in marriage

Jaya Jaitly Task Force to examine age of motherhood, imperatives of lowering MMR, improvement of nutritional levels and related issues. Examine the correlation of age of marriage and motherhood with:

• Health, medical well-being and nutritional status of mother and neonate/infant/child, during pregnancy, birth and thereafter.
• Key parameters like Infant Mortality Rate (IMR), Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR), Total Fertility Rate (TFR), Sex Ratio at Birth (SRB), Child Sex Ratio (CSR) etc.
• Any other relevant points pertaining to health and nutrition in this context.

Argument in favor of increasing legal age for marriage

• Early marriage denies girls the right to the highest attainable standard of general, sexual, and reproductive health. It also constrains evolving physical, emotional, and personal maturity required to safely transition to adulthood.
• Girls who get married at a younger age are not educated properly and do not have access to healthcare, vaccination, antenatal care, and even facilities for safe delivery
• Maternal mortality, infant mortality and nutrition levels of children are dependent on age of mother. Children who are born to mothers who tend to get married at an early age may develop health problems.
• Those who marry later are more likely than others to have a higher secondary or college education, take on skilling opportunities and exercise their voices.
• Marriage at a young age means not even a quarter of women get into the labor force despite accounting for almost half of the 1.3 billion population.
• It will do away with the gender gap in the legal age at marriage (21 for male and 18 for female), and the underlying social norm which expects women to be younger than men at the time of marriage.

Issues with increasing legal age for marriage

• Lack of education, skilling and awareness of rights are not directly related to age only. Studies found that age played a relatively smaller role in affecting nutrition levels than wealth  or education.
• Child marriage is a social and economic issue. Despite PCMA, 2006 National Family Health Survey 4 (2015-16), 26.8% of women between ages 20-24 were married before the age of 18.
• Child marriage law is used by parents against daughters choosing their own husbands. It has become a tool for parental control.
• The median age at first marriage for both men and women in India has registered a significant decadal improvement with more people now marrying later than ever before. Any attempt to leapfrog through quick-fix and ill-conceived punitive measures may considerably reverse these gains.
• raising the minimum legal age of marriage for women to 21 years may deny many young women from experiencing pregnancy at these safest ages.

Way forward

• Incentivising and enabling girls to continue schooling up to Class 12 and helping to enhance their nutrition can stop under-age marriages.
• Efforts to address child marriage in consonance with the socio-economic realities that demand investment in education, welfare, and opportunities for women.
• 18th Law Commission report (2008) uniformity in the age of marriage at 18 years for both men and women and lowering the age of consent to 16 years, a recommendation also of the Justice Verma Committee.

Determinants of marriage age in India

• Social factors: such as dowry considerations (a younger bride would mean a lower dowry), a fear of loss of family honour and fear of what will people say if the woman remains unmarried.
• Education: NFHS 4, women having 12 or more years of schooling marry much later than other women.
• Religion: women age 25-49 is higher among Christian women (21.6 years), Jain women (21.2 years), and Sikh women (20.9 years) than women from all other specific religions (18.0-19.2 years).

Child marriage law in India

• Prohibition of Child Marriage Act (PCMA), 2006, sets minimum age of marriage at 18 years for women and at 21 for men. SBI, mean marriage age in India is already above 21 years (i.e. 22.3 years).
• PCMA treats underage marriage valid as long as the minors involved in the marriage want it to remain valid. PCMA allows the minor party to repudiate the marriage or to have it nullified right up till two years of attaining majority.
• PCMA also treats those underage marriages as void or having no legal validity, where they involve trafficking, enticement, fraud and deceit.
• POCSO Act penalizes penetrative sexual assault on a child by anyone related to the child through marriage.
• Section 375 of IPC penalizes sexual acts with a girl below 18 years of age, with or without her consent.