The Union Cabinet has passed the proposal to raise the legal age of marriage for women from 18 to 21 years, brining it at par with men in the country. The momentous occasion came over a year since Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced the raising of this age for women during his Independence Day address, 2020.
The government, according to a report published in The Indian Express, is all set to introduce the new legal age of marriage for women through an amendment to the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006. This will reportedly be followed by amendments to the Special Marriage Act and other laws like the Hindu Marriage Act of 1955.
The report also mentions that this clearance of the proposal is based on recommendations given by the Centre’s taskforce headed by Jaya Jaitly, which was set up in June 2020 by the Ministry of Women and Child Development to primarily assess “matters pertaining to age of motherhood, imperatives of lowering MMR (maternal mortality rate), improvement of nutritional levels, and related issues.” The taskforce’s recommendations were submitted to Niti Aayog, and then forwarded to the Union Cabinet for approval.
“I want to make clear that our reasoning behind the recommendation was never one of population control. Recent data released by NFHS 5 (National Family Health Survey) have already shown that the Total Fertility Rate is decreasing and the population is under control. The idea behind it (the recommendation) is the empowerment of women,” Jaitly was quoted as saying in the report.
She also revealed that the taskforce took feedback from 16 universities and engaged with more than 15 NGOs to reach out to “young people, particularly in rural and marginalised communities, such as in particular districts in Rajasthan where child marriage is quite prevalent. Feedback was taken across religions, and from urban and rural areas, equally.”
“Across the board, the feedback we received from young adults is that the age of marriage should be 22-23 years. There have been objections from certain quarters, but we felt it was more important to be guided by the target group,’’ she added.