Beyond the age barrier

Raising women's marriageable age needs complementary efforts

The government’s decision to amend the law to raise the legal marriage for women from 18 to 21, on a par with men, is welcome as a means of attaining gender parity. The intent of the amendment is irreproachable — improve women’s health and lower the maternal and infant mortality rates, and increase the sex ratio at birth. But in a sense, these issues reflect a deep-rooted societal problem that views women as functional assets performing child-bearing and — rearing, and household duties. It is notable, for instance, that the taskforce, led by Jaya Jaitly, set up by the women and child development ministry, said access to education and livelihood must be enhanced simultaneously for the law to be effective. In fact, the existence of a law setting a marriageable age must be viewed against the fact that child marriage remains a recurring issue in the third decade of 21st century India and, despite being outlawed, is impossible to monitor. More than a fifth of marriages (23 per cent) in India are child marriages, according to the data provided by the fifth edition of the National Family Health Survey (NFHS, 2019-20). It is, therefore, unclear whether merely raising the marriageable age for women will deliver the desired results.

The real change agent lies in delivering better education and health outcomes for girls. In this context, it must be noted that the substantive increase in the proportion of women marrying when they turned 18 showed only after sustained efforts by successive central governments through the 1990s and early 2000s to focus on the education of the girl child. That is why the current proportion of child marriages, though high, marks a significant improvement from the figure of 47 per cent recorded in the NFHS of 2005-06. But a third of married women were between the age of 18 and 20 years, according to the Sample Registration System data, pointing to the high propensity of Indian society to marry off their daughters as early as possible. This points to another issue that experts have raised; that merely educating girls through primary and secondary school may not be enough. Many girls are married after school because they have no access to higher education. Yet, as a recent Business Standard survey showed, women with a college education had better access to health, government services, and nutrition. Raising the marriageable age, therefore, needs to be complemented by the government’s continuing focus on girls’ education.

Several other tricky issues need to be addressed even as the relevant laws are amended. While the civil laws can be amended by Parliament, the government has indicated that Hindu and Christian personal law will also need to be tweaked. This leaves open the question of Muslim personal law, which sets the minimum marriageable age for both girls and boys at 15 years. The manner in which triple talaq law was criminalised under the National Democratic Alliance in 2019 raises yet again the issue of doing the right thing the wrong way. The zeal to protect the rights of all Indian women, irrespective of their religion, should not end up creating a communal flashpoint.