Early marriage in India

Although the legal age of marriage in India is 18, nearly half of young women marry—that is, begin cohabiting with their husbands—before their 18th birthday. Over the last decade and a half, little progress has been made in reducing the proportion of adolescents who become brides, according to a new report from the New York–based Guttmacher Institute and the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai. The report compares nationally representative surveys from 1993, 1999 and 2006, and finds that during that time, the proportion of young women who married as minors decreased slowly, from 50% to 45%. Similarly, the proportion of young women giving birth before age 18 declined somewhat over the same period, from 28% to 22%, which is not surprising, given that childbearing is closely tied to marriage.

While a range of socioeconomic and cultural factors may influence when a young woman gets married, past research has shown that areas with higher levels of girls' education have lower rates of early marriage. Keeping girls in school longer has also been found to delay early childbearing, which is rare outside of marriage in India.

Government programs aimed at reducing early marriage should focus on keeping girls in school longer. For example, in the western state of Goa and the northern state of Himachal Pradesh, the states with the highest proportions of young people who receive at least six years of schooling, only 12% of young women marry before age 18. By contrast, in the eastern states of Bihar and Jharkhand, where girls have some of the lowest levels of education, 60–61% of young women marry as minors. Consistent with this pattern, the proportion of young women between 20 and 24 years old who become mothers before age 18 is highest in Jharkhand (37%) and Bihar (31%) and lowest in Goa and Himachal Pradesh (5%).

Research has repeatedly shown that when girls stay in school longer, they delay marriage, desire smaller families and are better able to achieve their childbearing goals. One underlying problem is that many young Indian women are expected to marry while still adolescents and to have their first child shortly thereafter, often before they are physically mature enough to go through childbirth safely.

Hence, education holds promise for decreasing early marriage, and delays in marriage will go a long way toward reducing adolescent childbearing.