Raising the Age of Marriage in India
Legislation Alone Will Not be Enough to Improve the Lives of Young Women and Their Children
Abstract
Following the 2022 parliamentary debate around raising the legal age of marriage for females in India from 18 to 21, a new proposed bill aims to improve the health and well-being of young women and their children, reduce the incidence of teenage pregnancies and support women to secure better education and work opportunities.
Young Lives has been following 3,000 young people in India from childhood into early adulthood, generating in-depth finding on early marriage. This brief summarises these findings and argues that whilst improving gender parity in law would be a seismic shift for a country where the majority of young women currently get married between the ages of 18 and 21, legislative change alone is not enough to achieve the intended positive impacts. Instead, the authors argue that policymakers need to adopt a broad, holistic approach which responds to local circumstances and which tackles the underlying causes of early marriage and parenthood with measures that alleviate poverty, address prevailing gender norms, invest in quality education for girls, open up decent jobs for young women, protect vulnerable girls to make empowered marriage and fertility decisions and involve boys and young men to tackle gender inequality and patriarchal discrimination.
This is an output of the Young Lives at Work programme
Citation
Ford, K and Singh, R. (2022). Raising the Age of Marriage in India: Legislation Alone Will Not be Enough to Improve the Lives of Young Women and Their Children. Oxford: Young Lives.