State policy

Beyond rhe legal sphere (which has clearly received some attention from the women’s movement, child rights activists and others), the state has been quite active in the arena of policy (bur with much less public visibility or discussion). I do not know whether any direct links can be drawn between the invention of a new governmental figure that appeared in the final decade of the twentieth century and heightened concern for early marriage. South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) nations declared 1990 to be rhe Year of the Girl Child. Not unlike what transpired with the International Year of Women in 1975, SAARC then went on to extend the time frame and to pledge the period up to 2000 as the decade of the girl child. One way of gauging the agendas of this period is through rhe kinds of researches that came to be sponsored. The then-Department of Women and Child Development under the Ministry of Human Resource Development set up a central coordination committee across 22 women’s studies centres in the country in the mode of a national project that hoped to provide a common picture about the condition of the girl child in India. This larger project did nor materialize in published form. However, the West Bengal study did ger published (Bagchi, Guha and Sengupta 1997). Based on a survey and case studies, the book Loved and Unloved: The Girl Child in the Family concentrated on the socioeconomic status of girl children and their mothers in both rural and urban contexts along a range of parameters - health, education, work and so on. Children from the age group of six to 18 years from 600 households were surveyed. What is extremely telling is that in all the data presented, their marital status is not a topic of discussion, even though there are indications (when menstruation is being explored, for instance) that some of the girls were already married. (It should be noted that West Bengal is among those states with the highest rates of early marriage.) The overarching findings focussed on the kinds of biases mothers and frequently the girls themselves evinced, often cutting across class and caste, even though many mothers at the same time wanted their daughters to have better futures. Early marriage is not absent but is more in the nature of an unaddressed element in this West Bengal story of the girl child “pre-conditioned to see herself as a sojourner in her parents’ home. She is told from childhood that her husband’s house is her true home and that she will be married as soon as she grows up” (Bagchi and others 1997: 206).

One issue in particular did take precedence as the decade of the girl child wound to a close, but it was not child marriage. Against the backdrop of prior studies about “the endangered sex” came startling discoveries of practices of female infanticide in certain districts within the states of Tamil Nadu and Bihar in the 1980s and soon thereafter the rise of what was first called female foeticide and later gender-biased sex selection. Already in 1990 Amartya Sen made headlines with his essay “One hundred million women are missing” (Sen 1990). The figure of the woman decidedly gave way to that of the little girl, pre-pubertal, invariably depicted and iconized with pig tails and in school uniform. Indeed, the girl child has become most closely identified with efforts to address “missing women”, now uniformly referred to as missing girls, whether due to excess female child mortality or pre-birth sex selection.

Other policy interventions may have more actively focussed on child marriage, whether in the realm of population, women, children and youth. In one study on child marriage, as many as 96 policies and schemes were identified across the country which have some bearing on early marriage (Srinivasan and others 2015). The better-known ones include the National Population Policy 2000, the National Policy for the Empowerment of Women 2001, the National Youth Policy 2003 and its more recent version in 2014, the National Plan of Action for Children 2005, the National Policy for Children 2013, and the National Plan of Action for Children (NPAC) 2016. In several of them, the elimination or abolition of child marriage is listed as an aim. The NPAC 2016 said that it would reduce the prevalence of child marriage to 15 % by 2021. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Women and Child Development drafted a National Strategy Document on the Prevention of Child Marriage in 2013.

It provides broad guidance to state and district governments to help them shape their interventions to end child marriage. It adopts a holistic and ecological model and envisions a comprehensive approach to child marriage involving partnerships within and between the Centre, State, voluntary organizations, families and children/adolescents themselves.

This document outlines strategic directions to prevent child marriage under each thematic area including law enforcement, access to quality education and other opportunities, changing mind-sets and social norms, empowerment of adolescents, knowledge and data management and development of indicators that can be monitored. These need to be implemented by various stake holders including the central government, state governments, local self-governments, civil society and nongovernmental organizations using convergent and multi-dimensional approaches.

(Ministry of Women and Child Development, 2013 cited in NCPCR and Young Lives 2017)

However, for reasons not mentioned but which in all likelihood have to do with the change in government with the 2014 national elections, the policy has yet to be finalized and enter the public domain.

Among the many schemes that have been launched both at the central and state level, some of which address the needs of adolescent girls, are conditional cash transfer (CCT) schemes for the girl child. These are basically variations of the Girl Child Protection Scheme first launched in 1992 by the Tamil Nadu government under the Chief Ministership of Jayalalitha in the face of the re-emergence of female infanticide during the 1980s. In these schemes, at various stages in the life of a daughter, beginning with her birth registration, certain amounts of money are put into a state fund in her name. If she completes school and remains unmarried at the age of 18, a lump sum would be received by the girl. With names such as Apni Beti Apni Dhan, Dhanalaxmi, Ladli, and so on, such schemes were invariably burdened with various conditionalities and eligibility criteria and came to be popularly known as dahej or dowry schemes. Many were begun only to be dropped some years down the line; there was the possibility of a new one being brought in both at the central and state levels. Curiously, reviews have shown a scrambling in the very purpose of these schemes (Sekher 2012, Nanda and others 2016). Initially envisaged as an intervention to prevent child marriage or delay marriage until 18, they became known as schemes meant to address the missing girl child and to encourage families not to go in for sex-selective abortions. Various state governments - such as Kanyashree and Rajshree in West Bengal, Kalyan Lakshmi and Shaadi Mubarak in Telengana, Chandranna Pelli Kanuka in Andhra Pradesh and Rajashree in Rajasthan - have started yet another slew of fresh CCT schemes with a clear and explicit focus to delay the age of marriage to 18 years for girls. Notice that the very names of these schemes connote marriage rather than the “daughter” more common before.

In a perceptive study conducted in 2018 in select villages in Telengana and Andhra four years after the establishment of schemes in Telengana and only a few months into its beginning in Andhra, U. Vindhya, Nilanjana Ray and Ujithra Ponniah brought out various dimensions of CCTs that echo prior studies (Vindhya and others 2019). It should be noted that these schemes have very quickly become quite well known and even popular, especially in the case of Telengana, where a sum of Rs 100,000 would be paid to the girl’s mother (from financially poor families) upon demonstrating through documentary proof that the marriage had not taken place before the age of 18 years. (However, just how proof of age and age at marriage could be unambiguously determined where registration is so low or open to manipulation is another problem that this study acknowledged.) Vindhya and her co-researchers were in no doubt that the scheme has found beneficiaries. However, it was not so clear whether it is actually addressing child marriage and, even less, whether it is changing perceptions of gender. As they conclude:

The perception that the CCT scheme is for rendering financial assistance for marriage expenditure to poor families seems to be more predominant and primary rather than it being viewed as a measure to curb child marriage. Furthermore, the promise of money appears on the surface to increase the value of women, but seems to be also associated with negative fallouts such as reinforcing dowry and marriage expenses being borne by the bride’s family. If early marriage of girls is considered as a gender disempowering phenomenon, then provision of financial assistance by the state seems to be primarily addressing poverty alleviation and not gender inequality.

(Vindhya and others 2019: 63)

The overall picture that emerges from this range of policy responses at the level of the state is therefore one that is fitful and at times somewhat confusing. A plethora of policies and attendant schemes can be identified, but they are often short-lived and have agendas that appear to slide in and out. In particular, what needs more exploration is how policies themselves are made to address rather different problems in the course of their creation and deployment, such as those related to the adverse sex ratio and early marriage. Even where reducing child marriage is the clear aim, there are few signs that the attitude towards the girl has changed. One might in fact be tempted to ask whether an unintended fallout of such schemes is to underscore that girls are indeed a burden, lacking in value, for whom therefore financial compensation is required. Least of all, I might add, has marriage as an institution come into the picture in any way. In fact, in the study by Vindhya and her colleagues just cited, young girls themselves were found to have developed a greater interest in their marriage, what with money now coming their way thanks to their very own “elder brother” (anna in Telugu) the Chief Minister!

Policies that directly address child marriage have therefore had the effect of reinforcing the idea that girls lack value and equally that a girl’s future lies in her marriage. Notice therefore that both at the level of recent amendments to the law and in the directions taken by policy, it is marriage at 18 that is being reinforced and regulated. Indeed, there may be an even larger problem with the way in which CCT schemes emphasize 18 years as the “right” age at marriage, let alone “rewarding” the family at the time of marriage itself. Why should any scheme for the empowerment of girls be tied to her marriage? Why not shift attention to her education instead, fully subsidizing girls from secondary schooling to higher education without marriage being in the frame in the first place? There are indications that the government of Rajasthan is considering such a move (Shobhana Boyle, personal communication, June 2020).

We have already seen how, in her study of child marriage, Jaya Sagade castigated the law machinery of the Indian state for not challenging the basic validity of child marriage below the age of 18. She argued that there are several international human rights instruments that are sufficient to do so and also that there is enough social science data to make a case. Her book relied largely on epidemiological research findings available to her at the time, which were overwhelmingly about the negative impact on a girl’s reproductive health if she were to have children below the age of 18. Sagade added that to the extent that such information is limited within India, the experience of other countries on the ill effects of child marriage could be brought to the notice of the court (Sagade 2005: 95). These kinds of arguments - that is, the strong focus on international covenants and furthermore to an international literature - appear to be quite characteristic of the twenty-first-century moment in India that has seen fresh attention being paid to early and child marriage.