Till 2017, the age of consent for physical relations for a girl was 18 years, but the same was 15 years for a child bride. This, therefore, raised the issue of marital rape in child marriages. It was then that a Supreme Court bench consisting of Justices Madan Lokur and Deepak Gupta criminalised marital rape for girls under the age of 18 years in a landmark judgment.This therefore raises yet another question as to why underage marriages have not been criminalised altogether till now.As per the UN Children’s Fund, more than 1.5 million girls under the age of 18 get married in India. At a global level, one-third of the total are from India. According to 2019-21 NFHS data, 23 per cent marriages in India are child marriages. This is in blatant abrogation of the law in place right now.According to research by Partners For Law in Development (PLD), between 2014 and 2016, a total of 1,785 cases were registered against child marriages. However, only 274 were convicted out of which 65 per cent were cases of elopement.It is crystal clear that the authorities have not been vigilant enough to deal with the actual problem of child marriages. There has to be a complete ban on underage marriages.This problem is also widespread in many other nations. The 2010 report by the UN Population Fund, referred to earlier, estimates that in 146 countries, State or customary laws allow girls younger than 18 to marry with the consent of their parents.In the recent past, many nations have taken progressive steps towards this issue. For example, in 2018, Norway’s Parliament declared a blanket ban on marriages under the age of 18. Similar steps were taken in Tanzania by its Supreme Court in 2019, and through the establishment of a National Marriage Age Maturity Movement by the government in Indonesia last year.The decision of the government in India to raise the minimum age of marriage for women to 21 years could be seen as a progressive step to tackle this issue. However, unless this decision is accompanied with the illegalisation of child marriages, it will not be successful in bringing any significant reduction in child marriages.(IPA Service)Views are personalCourtesy: The Leaflet
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