India tackles child marriages

Besides such social pressures, financial compulsions, too, were a big reason for early marriages, she says. "Early marriage meant an additional earning member. Besides household chores, I needed to work in the fields with my husband, to supplement the household income."

These days, to evade the eye of activists or the police in urban India, a common modus operandi is to solemnize weddings in villages where the presence of the law is less conspicuous. Kamala Sargare, a diminutive 12-year-old in Chaitraban, recently got engaged to a man old enough to be her father, locals say. Her wedding, they say, is scheduled in a neighboring village next month.

The young girl returned blank looks when asked what marriage means. Her mother, noticing the line of questions was veering toward early marriage, hollered and pulled Kamala in, shutting the door firmly behind her.

"There are [loopholes] in the present law," says Jaya Sagade, a legal expert on the issue and the author of a book called "Child Marriage in India: Socio-legal and Human Rights Dimensions." "This act can only prevent child marriages. Once the ceremony is conducted, it can't hold it to be void. So even the police cannot do much."

In December 2004, a parliamentary committee led by Sudarsana Natchiappan tabled a report recommending changes to the current law. These include: voiding child marriages and making the crime punishable with up to two years in prison - up from the current three months.

If these changes are adopted, the question remains - as with the recent Supreme Court decision on marriage registration - whether enforcement will happen.

Mr. Natchiappan says further consultations with NGOs and child rights activists were needed to make the act stronger, causing some delay. He says the bill might be passed within this year.

Activists say the absence of an effective law makes it hard to change habits and structures ingrained in Indian society, particularly in rural areas. Last May, villagers in an obscure part of the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh fatally attacked a child welfare activist trying to stop child marriages. The villagers saw her as interfering with their ancient traditions.

To help girls break free from the shackles of well-established social norms, Bapat and others point to the need for better education opportunities. Currently, some girls from poor backgrounds are forced to drop out after they hit puberty for reasons as petty as the schools having no bathrooms.

What's heartening, however, is that more and more resistance to child marriages is coming from children themselves.

Ragini Dimle, an 18-year-old training to be a beautician at a school run by Swadhar, was pressured to marry a man, chosen by her brother-in-law, when she was just 14.

"I simply refused," she says, parsing her remarks with the precision of a girl forced to become too wise, too soon. "'I want to study and stand on my own feet first,' I told my parents firmly."

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