Raising the minimum age of marriage for women is welcome, but...

Legislation alone may not be effective when social practices are deep-rooted; awareness and dialogue are needed too

Saksham Misra | December 17, 2021


#Law   #society   #marriage   #union cabinet   #the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act  
(Illustration: Ashish Asthana)
(Illustration: Ashish Asthana)

The Union Cabinet has approved the proposal to amend the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act. The proposal seeks to increase the legal age of marriage for women from 18 to 21, bringing it at par with men. I welcome this proposal as a progressive move towards empowering women and strengthen the tenets of gender equality. But I have a fundamental concern with regards to the efficacy of the proposed amendment. By ‘efficacy’ I mean how effectively this amendment can bring the social changes in society and yield the desired outcomes for which it is proposed. This concern of efficacy is more pertinent in the context of personal laws because it pokes into our family affairs.

I argue that the efficacy of personal laws or any progressive legislation, which aims to bring about structural changes in society, highly depends on its ‘legitimacy’ and not purely on its content. The legitimacy of a law can be measured from its social acceptance – how smoothly society accepts the changes which the proposed legislation is bringing. If the changes are too radical, then it becomes difficult for a legislation to gain social acceptance.

Let me exemplify my argument. The recently repealed farm laws are a classic example of how a legislation aiming for making structural changes in the agriculture sector failed due to lack of social acceptance (legitimacy) by the farmers community. We need to learn from the farm laws episode that for bringing in structural changes in society through a legislation, we need to first do the groundwork of creating its social acceptance. This groundwork will develop social consensus for the changes which the law will bring.  

Therefore, I am raising the concern of efficacy, as to how efficiently the proposed amendment related to the minimum age of marriage for women will gain social acceptance. This is a seminal issue in the context of rural India where child marriage is still deep-rooted. I doubt whether the rural and suburban India will accept the increase in the age of marriage, or would rather continue with their existing social practices. To put it more clearly, whether the said amendment will be socially accepted or it will remain on paper? This concern is relevant because we have a law in force which prohibits the child marriage but still we can see that the practice of child marriage is widespread.

I strongly believe that apart from taking legislative steps, the policymakers must create awareness and dialogue within society. The problems like child marriage cannot be resolved just by passing laws and penalising offences. Social problems like child marriage are deep-rooted and mostly they are intermixed with cultural or religious beliefs of society. They can be resolved by creating social awareness and initiating dialogue. This does not mean that I am rejecting the role of legislation in resolving social problems; rather I am suggesting that both legal and non-legal measures must be used to resolve social problems.

Misra is Assistant Professor, Indore Institute of Law (IIL).

Comments

 

Other News

Boost to offshore wind energy projects

In a major decision, the Government has decided to grant waiver of ISTS charges to Off-Shore Wind Projects and extend the waiver to Green Hydrogen/Green Ammonia. This decision has been taken to facilitate wider execution of offshore wind energy initiatives, to promote the expansion of Green Hydrogen / Gree

Duty of stakeholders to provide cost effective, alternate energy fuels: Gadkari

Urging use of alternative and cost effective fuels to reduce pollution caused by vehicles, union road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari on Thursday said finding cost-effective fuels is the need of the hour and underlined that use of fuels like bio-CNG and green hydrogen help in protecting the e

Record production of rice, wheat, and sugarcane estimated

The foodgrain production of 3305.34 lakh tonnes is estimated in the current agricultural year 2022-23 – higher by 149.18 LMT as compared to the previous year, according to the Third Advance Estimates of production of major crops released by the ministry of agriculture and farmers welfare.

India`s ‘AIRAWAT’ ranks 75th in top 500 Supercomputing List

The AI Supercomputer ‘AIRAWAT’, installed at C-DAC, Pune, has been ranked 75th in the world. It was declared so in the 61st edition of Top 500 Global Supercomputing List on Tuesday at the International Supercomputing Conference (ISC 2023) in Germany. It puts India on top of AI S

Ocean Dialogue a great opportunity for G20 members

The ongoing third Environment and Climate Sustainability Working Group G20 meeting (May 21-23) has focused on three aspects: land degradation and reclamation of mining areas, Blue Economy and sustainable ocean management and resource sufficiency and circular economy. Leena Nandan, secretary,

Semi hi-speed trains, buses could be primary alternative to cars

We are not paying sufficient attention to the rapidly growing oil imports (from pre-Covid-19 to post-Covid, in 2022). They surged from 102 million tons (MT) in 2019-20 to 168 MT in 2022-23, an increase of 68%.   India is the largest importer of oil in the world, and, at current rate, we

Visionary Talk: Amitabh Gupta, Pune Police Commissioner with Kailashnath Adhikari, MD, Governance Now


Archives

Current Issue

Opinion

Facebook Twitter Google Plus Linkedin Subscribe Newsletter

Twitter