The Narendra Modi government’s plan to raise the minimum age of marriage to 21 years for women can help improve workforce participation, as more and more women will be able to pursue higher education and a career, according to a recent report from SBI Research. This comes as the average age of marriage declined further to 22.1 years in 2019 from 22.3 years a year ago, according to the latest survey findings of the Sample Registration System (SRS), conducted by the government.
“We believe increasing the legal age has the potential to reduce India’s MMR (Maternal Mortality Rate) and will lead to more females doing graduation and hence coming into labour force. Another benefit is legal marriage age will become same for men and women,” according to SBI Ecowrap from last week.
Even though the average figures are higher than the proposed minimum age, every second woman in a pool of five was married before the age of 21. The situation is much dire in states like West Bengal where nearly half of the women were married before the age of 21.
India ranks among poorest performers in female labour force participation
According to the World Bank, India ranks amongst the poorest performers in terms of women participation in the labour force, with female labour participation rate of 20%, marginally higher than war-torn Afghanistan, and substantially lower than average women labour participation of higher income countries at 44.5%. Female labour force participation has been hampered further due to the pandemic.
According to a CMIE (Centre for Monitoring Indian Economy) report, lockdowns due to COVID-19 pandemic hit both the female and male workforce, but the impact was skewed in favour of male workforce; women face a particularly hard time in deteriorating labour market conditions. “Women accounted for 10.7 per cent of the workforce in 2019-20 but they suffered 13.9 per cent of the job losses in April 2020, the first month of the lockdown shock. By November 2020, men recovered most of their lost jobs but women were less fortunate. 49 per cent of the job losses by November were of women. The recovery has benefitted all but, it benefitted women less than it did for men.has further led to even lower female participation in labour force,” the CMIE report said.
Can raising the legal age of marriage improve socio-economic indicators?
In December, the government presented a bill in Parliament to increase the legal age of marriage for women to 21 years from 18 years, at par with legal age for men. However, after resistance from the opposition parties, the bill was sent to a parliamentary panel for further evaluation. The SBI report said even though the increase in the legal marriage age will be beneficial in terms of both social and economic terms, some of the states will be faced with a daunting task of altering the social and cultural behaviour of people.
India is home to the largest number of child brides, according to UNICEF, this is despite legal age for women being 18 years from the last four decades. While the proponents of the government’s plans argue that increasing the legal age of marriage will have trickle down effects and improve health indicators such as maternal mortality rates and teenage pregnancy.
Others are of the view that unless there is a larger societal and cultural change, especially in states with poorer health indicators, the situation will not improve. Despite the existence of older law, the latest National Family Health Survey findings suggested that one in every fourth women aged between 20-24 years was married before she was 18 years old.