Prime Minister Narendra Modi is about to take a bold step that may annoy his hard-core supporters but will help India move towards gender parity.  

The issue relates to the marriage age of women. The government did not take it up with any zeal for social reform.  It was drawn into it by mundane healthcare considerations.

Currently the minimum age for marriage is 21 for men and 18 for women. These were prescribed in 1978 by amending a law dating back to the colonial period. That law was introduced to check child marriage which was rampant at that time. It fixed the age of marriage for girls at 15 years and for boys at 18.

The 1978 decision to raise the age limit for both men and women was taken with a view to delaying marriage, mainly as a means of curbing galloping population growth. Both boys and girls attain majority at the age of 18. They also get the right to vote at that age.

Having different age limits for men and women for marriage purposes attracted criticism in recent years on two grounds: one is that it is against the principle of gender parity and the other is that it legitimises the traditional belief that wives must be younger than husbands.

The Law Commission and the National Human Rights Commission had recommended that the same minimum age be fixed for both men and women.

Last June the Ministry of Women and Child Development set up a task force to study and report on issues related to motherhood. The intention was to address concerns about health of women and children.

The task force is headed by Ms Jaya Jaitley, former President of the Samata Party, an erstwhile ally of the Bharaiya Janata Party.

The Ministry asked it to examine the correlation of age of marriage and age of motherhood with health, medical well-being, and nutritional status of the mother and neonate, infant or child, during pregnancy, birth and thereafter.

It was asked also to examine the possibility of increasing the age of marriage for women from 18 to 21 years.

According to published reports, initially the government had considered reducing the marriage age of men also to 18 to establish parity. Such a decision would have gladdened the BJP’s conservative clientele.

However it realised that it might push up the rate of growth of the population again.  Since education levels among women were rising, it decided to explore the possibility of increasing the marriage age for women also to 21.

Incidentally, the new move is in tune with Modi’s flagship “beti bachao, beti padhao” (Save the girl child, Educate the girl child) programme.

The Ministry had asked the task force to come up with its report by July 31. That gave it less than two months to look into all aspects of the complex issue and formulate its recommendations.

The task force’s report is yet to come. But the Prime Minister has said the government will take a decision on the issue of marriage age of women as soon as it is received. As far as is known, the group is going about its task  in an academic manner, relying primarily on official data relating to fertility rate, maternal mortality, infant mortality, child sex ratio etc.

There is much to commend in the scientific approach the Ministry has brought to bear on the issue. However, in the absence of any public consultations, there is room to entertain doubts about how the largely conservative society will react to the task force’s recommendations.

Although child marriage was banned in 1929, close to a century ago, it is known to prevail even now in many states, especially in the backward rural areas. A 2005 United Nations report estimated that as many as 30 per cent of the girls were married off before the age of 18.

In 2006 the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government enacted a law to prohibit child marriage but there have been few prosecutions under it. Happily, successive decennial census reports indicate that under-18 marriages are coming down continuously.

The Rashtriya Swayam Sevak Sangh, the BJP’s ideological mentor, is known to hold regressive views on gender parity. Its chief, Mohan Bhagat, quite recently reiterated in public his view that women should remain housewives and men should be the breadwinners.

If the RSS does not throw its weight behind the move to raise the marriage age for women, there may be resistance to it at the ground level.