Eighteen years after the launch of Bal Vivah Mukt Bharat Abhiyan (“Child-Marriage-Free India”), India still wakes up every morning to weddings that should not be happening—girls in borrowed saris, boys barely into adolescence, rituals performed before childhood has had a chance to finish. The anniversary of this national campaign is both a moment to acknowledge real progress and a reminder that child marriage remains one of the country’s most stubborn social evils, surviving laws, awareness drives, and decades of reformist intent.
When the Abhiyan was launched in 2007, child marriage was widely seen as an unavoidable social practice rooted in poverty, caste, and tradition. Since then, India has strengthened its legal framework, most notably through the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, and expanded schemes targeting girls’ education, nutrition, and financial security. National surveys show a clear decline: the proportion of women aged 20–24 who were married before 18 has fallen significantly over the past two decades. Campaigners rightly point to these numbers as evidence that sustained advocacy, school enrolment drives, and grassroots vigilance can work.
Yet an editorial published recently in The Hindu underscores an uncomfortable truth: progress has slowed, plateaued, and in some places reversed. Child marriage has not vanished; it has adapted. In districts across Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, underage marriages are pushed into smaller ceremonies, conducted at night, or disguised as engagements to evade the law. The practice of बाल विवाह (bāl vivāh) continues to thrive in the gaps between legislation and lived reality.
Poverty remains the most powerful driver. For families facing economic precarity, marrying off a daughter early is still seen as reducing household burden and protecting “honour” (इज़्ज़त, izzat). Dowry expectations often rise with age, pushing parents to arrange marriages earlier rather than later. In communities where girls’ mobility is tightly controlled, marriage is framed as safety—an argument that gained traction during pandemic lockdowns, when school closures and income shocks reportedly triggered a spike in child marriages across several states.
Gender norms are reinforced by silence. Adolescent girls rarely have the power to refuse marriages negotiated by elders, and boys are socialised into seeing early marriage as a marker of masculinity and responsibility. While child marriage is often discussed as a “girls’ issue,” the Abhiyan has long stressed that ending it requires transforming attitudes toward both genders. Still, programmes addressing boys and young men remain patchy and underfunded.
The legal system, too, sends mixed signals. Although child marriage is prohibited, it is not automatically void unless challenged in court, placing the burden on minors to seek annulment—an unrealistic expectation for many. Enforcement varies wildly between states, and frontline workers such as anganwadi staff, teachers, and child protection officers are frequently overstretched or pressured by local power structures to “look the other way.” In some cases, police interventions are framed as cultural intrusion rather than protection, fuelling resistance instead of compliance.
What the 18th anniversary of Bal Vivah Mukt Bharat Abhiyan makes clear is that ending child marriage is not only about laws or campaigns, but about persistence. It requires sustained investment in secondary education for girls, safe transport to schools, access to sexual and reproductive health information, and livelihood opportunities that give families alternatives to early marriage. It also demands political courage: confronting caste councils, religious leaders, and vote-bank calculations that quietly tolerate the practice.
India has shown that change is possible. Millions of girls who might once have been married at 14 or 15 are now finishing school, delaying marriage, and imagining different futures. But the continued existence of child marriage, 18 years into a national eradication campaign, is a warning. Without renewed urgency, sharper accountability, and deeper social transformation, India risks normalising a practice it has long promised to eliminate—leaving another generation of children married before they have had the chance to choose their own lives.
Spicy Auntie has lit a candle for the 18th anniversary of Bal Vivah Mukt Bharat Abhiyan, and no, it’s not a celebration candle. It’s one of those “power-cut emergency” ones, because that’s what this anniversary feels like: proof that the lights keep flickering when it comes to child marriage in India. Eighteen years is long enough for a girl to be born, pulled out of school, married off, and already raising a child of her own. Sit with that timeline for a second.
Every anniversary speech tells us the same comforting story. Numbers are improving. Awareness is growing. Laws are in place. And yet, somewhere tonight, a girl is being dressed up as a bride when she should be worrying about exams, crushes, or whether she’s allowed to stay out late with friends. Somewhere, a boy is being told that becoming a husband is what makes him a man, before he’s had a chance to become anything else.
What really irritates Auntie is this national talent for pretending child marriage is a “social issue” floating in the abstract. No, darling. It is a very concrete decision, made by adults, enforced by families, blessed by communities, and tolerated by institutions. Poverty is real, yes. But poverty doesn’t force a priest to chant mantras at midnight. Tradition doesn’t whisper to the police officer to look away. Culture doesn’t automatically silence the girl who says no. People do.
We love to say, “It still happens in villages,” as if villages exist in a time warp untouched by mobile phones, government schemes, and WhatsApp forwards. Let’s be honest: child marriage survives not because people don’t know it’s illegal, but because they believe consequences are negotiable. Because honour feels heavier than law. Because daughters are still seen as liabilities that must be transferred early, preferably before they learn too much or ask inconvenient questions.
And while we’re at it, can we stop pretending this is only about girls? Boys are being robbed too—of education, of emotional maturity, of choice. But patriarchy is clever that way: it hands boys responsibility and calls it privilege, then wonders why they grow up confused, frustrated, and fragile.
Spicy Auntie isn’t impressed by anniversaries. She’s impressed by accountability. By schools that keep girls enrolled until eighteen and beyond. By officials who cancel weddings instead of posing for awareness photos. By communities that stop whispering and start intervening. A child-marriage-free India isn’t a slogan you dust off once a year. It’s work. Daily, messy, uncomfortable work. And until that happens, Auntie will keep blowing out these candles, one by one, wondering how many childhoods are still being burned in the dark.