Hidden Truth of Child Marriage in India

This book offers the most comprehensive and multidimensional examination to date of child marriage in India, situating the country’s experience within global debates on gender, health, and development. Bringing together quantitative, qualitative, spatial, and policy analyses, the book moves beyond prevalence statistics to interrogate the complex drivers, lived realities, and evolving patterns of child marriage in diverse contexts. Spanning eight interlinked chapters, the book opens with a critical reframing of child marriage research in India—highlighting both progress and persistence, and identifying underexplored domains such as intersectional vulnerabilities, youth perspectives, and crisis-induced triggers. It proceeds to map the fine-grained geography of child marriage at district and community levels, exposing local disparities and pinpointing high- and low-prevalence clusters. Household- and individual-level determinants are unpacked alongside intimate accounts of agency, resistance, and familial negotiation, revealing how socio-economic disadvantage interacts with aspirations and constraints. The qualitative core delves into cultural norms, dowry practices, and gender expectations, while also incorporating fresh perspectives from adolescent boys and expert stakeholders. Emerging structural vulnerabilities—such as climate change, displacement, and pandemic-related disruptions—are examined for their role in intensifying the precarity that sustains early marriage. Subsequent chapters explore how child marriage intersects with women’s education, work participation, and aspirations, and how it shapes both immediate and long-term health outcomes, underlining its role as a social determinant of entrenched inequality. The legal and policy analysis traces the evolution of child marriage laws in India, evaluates enforcement and implementation challenges, and assesses the impact of state and national schemes. Comparative insights from other Global South contexts deepen the analysis, providing lessons for policy adaptation. The concluding chapter synthesizes these findings into a multi-level, feminist-informed policy agenda that centers adolescent voices, promotes gender-transformative education, and balances universal goals with local realities.

This book makes the case that ending child marriage in India—and globally—requires not only tracking its decline but also understanding its persistence, interrogating structural and cultural drivers, and designing responses that are context-specific, intersectional, and transformative. By integrating advanced spatial analysis, robust statistical modeling, participatory qualitative methods, Delphi-based expert consensus, and policy evaluation, this book addresses critical gaps in the literature and speaks to scholars, policymakers, practitioners, and advocates working on gender equality (SDG 5), health and well-being (SDG 3), reduced inequalities (SDG 10), and sustainable development more broadly.