Child marriages on the rise in India

The call came on Aug 18 at 1.45 pm, a little before Mr Narayana Sukla was about to settle for lunch.

He heard a girl sob on the line. "Please rescue me immediately or they will kill me," the 12-year-old told him.

"My mother has forced me to get married but I want to study," she pleaded, using her 19-year-old husband's phone on the sly.

A coordinator for Childline India Foundation, which manages a government-supported national helpline for children in distress, = Sukla knew he had no time to lose.

He called up concerned government officers and promptly left his office in Cuttack in the state of Odisha.

Born to poor and illiterate parents, the girl had been married on Aug 12 and even sexually assaulted by her husband.

Sukla reached the girl's in-laws' house in Dandapadi, a remote village in the district, after travelling for nearly five hours.

She was rescued that night - the family showed no resistance, as Sukla was accompanied by local police - and subsequently placed in a government-supported shelter.

It was one of the 13 child marriage cases Sukla has had to intervene in since March 20 this year.

"We are getting more cases of child marriage since the lockdown," he told The Straits Times.

The Covid-19 pandemic has prompted a spike in child marriages across India, as struggling families, many rendered jobless and pushed further back into poverty, resort to marrying off their girls to reduce their financial burden.

Data from Childline India Foundation indicates its representatives had to intervene in 14,775 cases of prevention of child marriages between January and July this year.

This trend of an increase in child marriages has been exacerbated by schools remaining shut since March. Many poor families relied on government schools to keep their children engaged as well as fed through mid-day meals that were served there.

Without this source of sustenance, families are now being forced to send their sons out for work and have their daughters married.

"Every out-of-school girl is a potential child bride," Ms Ananya Chakraborti, the chairman of the West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights (WBCPCR), said, adding that increased poverty and joblessness have made such girls further vulnerable. "It's like one-less-mouth-to-feed kind of thing," she added.

Despite considerable progress, child marriage remains endemic in India, a country that accounts for one out of every three child brides in the world. According to 2019 data from Unicef, 102 of the 223 million child brides in India were married before they turned 15.