The silent scourge strangling childhoods in Andhra Pradesh

At her home in Vaddera Colony in Rajiv Nagar on the outskirts of Vijayawada city, 16-year-old Sushma is getting ready to leave for school. She looks smart in her green-white uniform and long braided hair neatly folded and tucked behind her ears. Around her, the colony, a dense grid of modest, one-room houses packed tightly against one another along narrow lanes, drowns in the din of morning rush hour. Hardly six months ago, however, Sushma was married off to a 22-year-old day labourer from Devarapalli village in Rajamahendravaram district. It was after the intervention by a team of volunteers from an NGO and government officials, who arrived at her home soon after the ‘wedding’ on June 11, that she was put back in school. “I have been instructed to ensure that the two live apart until she turns 18,” says Bathina Penchalamma, her mother. The groom, who fled the scene in panic that day, returned later to sign an undertaking, agreeing to wait until she attained the age of 18. Sushma was produced before the Child Welfare Committee and later shifted to a Child Care Institution (CCI) at Krishnalanka for two months. At the time of marriage, Sushma was just 15 years old, says O. Sowjanya, a volunteer from the NGO Vasavya Mahila Mandali (VMM), which works in collaboration with Delhi-based Just Rights for Children (JRC) to end child marriages in Andhra Pradesh. The JRC is a network of over 250 organisations working to protect, promote and advocate for the rights and welfare of children, especially those in vulnerable situations. An entrenched practice It has been 18 years since the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, came into force in India, but the practice continues to take its toll on countless children, at times with the tacit approval of officials. Sowjanya recalls an incident to this effect. When she learnt that a 17-year-old was being married off to a 30-year-old man at Luna Centre of Singhnagar, she rushed to the venue along with local anganwadi staff and police personnel to stop the wedding. “I would have reached in time to prevent the marriage, but some local staff, apparently under political pressure to overlook the case, misled me by giving me the wrong address,” says Sowjanya. A local secretariat staff, who requested anonymity, says that there is little that can be done in cases wherein the entire family appears complicit in violating the law. “Their indifference to the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act was evident from their earlier two failed attempts to marry the girl off to the same man, a relative, when she was just 15 years old. The girl’s paternal grandmother expressed her anger at the volunteer and the government officials, accusing them of “unnecessary interference” in what she described as a matter that concerns only her family. In another case, a team comprising a volunteer and mahila police personnel swooped in on the house of B. Lakshmi Prasanna at Old Rajarajeswaripeta on August 14, a day before the...

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