CHILD MARRIAGE

Child marriage is illegal in India. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t take place; that too with alarming frequency. 27% of girls in India are married before their 18th birthday, 7% of these are married before they turn 15. According to Unicef, India has the highest absolute number of child brides in the world: 15,509,000.

There is an interconnectedness between poverty, lack of education and societal norms. Girls are seen as a liability by many parents because our social conditioning is not to think of them as individuals who should be given opportunities to live independent lives. Parents marry off their daughters in order to help them escape poverty, or improve their own circumstance by having one mouth less to feed. Girls are also taught from a young age to take care of all the household labour and this itself becomes an incentive for many to get their sons married.

Child brides are very often not educated, they don’t have money of their own, and they end up having children far too early. All of these become added reasons why they are unable to imagine better circumstances for themselves. This trickles down to their own daughters too, a cycle that they never seem able to come out of.

This is why it’s so important to focus on the education of the girl child. Educate them to create awareness of the better options that await them; and this is precisely what we aim to do at Maatru Pratishtana by providing scholarships to girls and funding their fees for higher education.