Priti David

Priyanka Borar

Illustration

P. Sainath

Editor

Sharmila Joshi

Series Editor

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Meena will be
married off anytime now. That’s because, she says, some months ago “I became a
problem.” Her younger cousin Sonu, who acquired ‘problem’ status several weeks
after Meena did, is also in line for marriage. ‘Problems’ are what girls like them
become when they start menstruating. Meena,
14, and Sonu, 13, seated side by side on a string charpoy, look at each other when they talk, but mostly stare down at the
sandy floor of Meena’s house, a little shy about discussing the change –
menstruation – with a stranger. In the room behind them, a lone kid goat is
tethered to a short peg in the ground. It can’t be let out for fear of wild
animals which lurk around Baithakva, a hamlet in Uttar Pradesh’s Koraon block.
So it stays indoors, they tell us, in this tiny home hemmed in by several others.


The
girls have just figured out what menstruation is – as something they should be ashamed of. And fear – which they have inherited from their parents. Concerns
about the safety of women and anxiety
about a possible pre-marital pregnancy once a girl becomes sayyani
(mature) push the families of this hamlet in Prayagraj (formerly Allahabad) district to arrange early marriages of their daughters – often at as young an age as 12.

“How
are we expected to keep our girls safe once they become old enough to get
pregnant?” asks Meena’s mother Rani, 27, who herself was married and a mother
by  age 15. Sonu’s mother Champa, now  around 27 too,
also remembers getting married at the same age as her daughter is now –
13. The six women gathered around us all
say that marriages of girls who are 13 or
14 is the norm rather than an exception
in this hamlet. “Hamara gaon ek doosra zamana
mein rehta hai [Our village
lives in another era]. We don’t have a choice. We are helpless,” says Rani.

Child marriage is
a widespread practice across a large cluster of districts in the north-central belt of Uttar
Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Bihar and Chhattisgarh. A 2015 <a href="https://www.icrw.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/District-level-study-on-Child-Marriage-in-India.pdf">district level study</a> jointly conducted by the
International Centre for Research on Women and UNICEF says that “more
than 50 per cent women in almost two-thirds of districts in these states are
married off before the legal age.”



The Prohibition Of
Child
Marriage Act, 2006 forbids marriage
if the girl is less than 18 years old and the boy is not yet 21. The punishment
for promoting or permitting such a marriage is up to two years rigorous
imprisonment and a fine which may extend up to Rs. 1 lakh.

“The question of
getting caught for anything illegal does not arise,” says Nirmala Devi, 47, an anganwadi worker from the
village, “as there is no birth certificate to refer to.” She’s right – <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/library/resource/national-family-health-survey-nfhs-4-2015-16-uttar-pradesh/">42 per cent of children</a> born in Uttar Pradesh’s
rural areas do not have their births registered, according to the National
Family Health Survey (NFHS-4, 2015-16). The figure for Prayagraj district is
even higher at 57 per cent. “People don&#39;t get to hospital,”
she adds. “Earlier, we would just make a phone call and get an ambulance from
the Koraon Community Health Centre [CHC], 30 kilometres away. But now we are
required to use a mobile App – 108 – which needs 4G connectivity. But there’s
no network here and you can&#39;t get to the CHC for delivery,” she explains.
In other words, the switch to an app has made a bad situation worse. In a country that sees 15
lakh child brides like Sonu and Meena each year, the law alone doesn’t deter
families from continuing with the practice. In UP, one out of five women is
married before the legal age, says NFHS-4. “Bhagaa dete hain [They shoo me
away],” says 30-yera-old Sunita Devi Patel, an ASHA worker (Accredited Social Health
Activist) in Baithakva and surrounding hamlets, about the parents she tries to engage with. “I plead
with them to wait for the girls to grow up. I tell them it is dangerous for them
to get pregnant at such a young age. They don’t pay any attention and tell me
to leave. When I go the next time, perhaps a month or so later, the girl is
already married!” But the
parents have their own reasons to worry, “There is no toilet in the house,”
complains Meena’s mother Rani. “Every time they leave to go into the fields for
that, some 50 to 100 metres away, or even when they go out to graze the
animals, we worry that something bad might happen to them.” She recalls the gruesome rape and murder of a
19-year-old Dalit girl in September 2020 by upper caste men in in UP’s Hathras
district. “Hamein Hathras ka dar hamesha
hai
[We are always worried about something happening like in Hathras].” 

The deserted road leading into Baithakva from Koraon – the district
headquarters – winds 30 kilometres through open scrub forest and fields. A five-kilometre
stretch that passes through jungle and hillocks
is particularly deserted and dangerous. Locals say that they have sighted
bodies with bullet wounds flung into the bushes there. A police chowki (post)
would help, they say, as would better roads. During
the monsoons, some 30 villages in the area around Baithakva are completely
marooned, sometimes for weeks.

Around the hamlet, the low,
brown and dry Vindhaychal hills, splashed with prickly scrub undergrowth, rise
up on one side and mark the state’s border with Madhya Pradesh. The single
semi-tarred road has Kol houses and fields mostly belonging to OBC families
(with only a few small plots held by Dalits), straggling on either side. Fear pervades this hamlet of
around 500 Scheduled Caste families, all of them <a href="http://socialjustice.nic.in/writereaddata/UploadFile/Scan-0019.jpg">Kols</a>, and some 20 OBC households. “Just a few months ago, one of our girls was walking in
the village and some [upper caste] boys forced her to sit on
their motorbike and go for a ride with them. She somehow managed to jump off, picked
herself up and ran home,” Rani says, her voice anxious. On June 12, 2021, a 14-year-old Kol girl went missing
and to date has not been found. Her family says they filed a first information
report (FIR) but were unwilling to show it to us. They feared drawing attention
to themselves and angering the police, who others say arrived to enquire into the incident only two weeks after it happened.   

“We
are poor people of a certain status [Scheduled Caste]. You tell me, do the
police care? Does anyone care? We live with the fear and the shame [of rape or
abduction],” says Nirmala Devi, lowering her voice as she speaks.   

Nirmala,
a Kol herself, is one of the very few in the hamlet with the BA degree that she
studied for after her marriage to Murarilal, a farmer. A mother of four educated boys, she supported
their studies in a private school in nearby Dramandganj town of Mirzapur
district with her own earnings. “I finally got out of the house only after my
third pregnancy,” she says with a nervous laugh, and adds, “I wanted to be able to
educate my children; that was the driving force.” Nirmala now also supports the education and
training of her daughter-in-law Sridevi as an auxiliary nurse midwife (ANM) in
Prayagraj city. Sridevi married her son when she turned 18.

But other parents in the village are more fearful. According to the National Crime Records
Bureau, the state of Uttar Pradesh <a href="https://ncrb.gov.in/sites/default/files/CII%202019%20Volume%201.pdf">recorded 59,853 crimes</a> against women in 2019. That is,
164 crimes every single day on average. These include rape of minors as well as adult girls and women,
kidnapping, abduction and human trafficking.

“When
girls start getting noticed [by men] it becomes difficult to keep them safe,”
says Mithilesh, a cousin of Sonu and Meenu. “Dalits here have one wish: to keep
our name and dignity. Marrying our girls off early can ensure that.” 

A
worried Mithilesh leaves behind his son and daughter, aged 9 and 8, in the
village when he migrates to work at brick kilns or for sand mining jobs wherever he can find them. 

His
monthly earnings of around Rs. 5,000 supplement his wife’s income from selling
firewood and working in the fields of others during harvest time. Around their
own hamlet, cultivation is not an option. “We can’t grow any crops as wild
animals eat everything. Wild boars even come into our compounds because we are
next to the jungle,” says Mithilesh.

According to Census 2011, 61 per cent of the population of <a href="https://censusindia.gov.in/2011census/dchb/DCHB_A/09/0944_PART_A_DCHB_ALLAHABAD.pdf">Deoghat</a>, the village in
which Baithakva is a hamlet, is engaged in agricultural labour, household
industry and other jobs. “In every home more than one man will migrate for wage
work,” says Mithilesh. They go to Allahabad, Surat and Mumbai in search of
employment, he adds, working at brick kilns or on daily wage jobs in other sectors,
earning about Rs. 200 a day. “Koraon is the
most neglected of Prayagraj district’s 21 blocks,” says Dr. Yogesh Chandra
Srivastava. He is a scientist at the Sam Higginbotham University of
Agriculture, Technology and Sciences in Prayagraj, and has worked in this region for 25 years. “The overall district figures do not
reflect the sad state of affairs here,” he adds. “Take any parameter – from
crop yield to school dropouts, to migration for low-end jobs, poverty, child
marriage and infant mortality – Koraon in particular is not developed.”Once married, Sonu and Meena will move to the homes of their husbands,
in a village some 10 kilometres away. “I have not yet met him [the groom],”
says Sonu. “But I saw his face on my paternal uncle’s mobile phone. I talk to
him often. He’s a few years older than me, around 15, and works as a helper in
a kitchen in Surat.”

This
January, schoolgirls in the Baithakva government middle school had a chance to
get free pads along with a bar of soap and a towel, and to watch a video on
hygienic practices during menstruation shown in their school by a visiting NGO.
Also, under the central government’s <a href="https://wcd.nic.in/kishori-shakti-yojana/">Kishori Suraksha Yojana</a>, girls from
Classes 6 to 12 are eligible to receive <a href="https://ruralindiaonline.org/en/articles/locked-down-schoolgirls-no-basic-needs-period/">free sanitary napkins</a>. The programme
was introduced in Uttar Pradesh by then chief minister Akhilesh Yadav in 2015. 

But
neither Sonu nor Meena go to school anymore. “We don’t attend school, so we
don’t know about this,” says Sonu. Both of them would have liked to
have had
the free sanitary pads instead of the cloth they presently use.  

Though
about to be married, both girls have little or no idea about sex, pregnancy or
even menstrual hygiene. “My mother told me to ask my bhabhi [older paternal cousin brother’s wife] about it. My bhabhi told me not to lie
down next to any [family] man from now on, or it will be a big problem,” Sonu
says, lowering her voice as she speaks. The eldest daughter in a family of
three girls, Sonu dropped out of school in Class 2 at age 7 to take care of her
younger sisters.  

She
then started accompanying her mother Champa when she went to the fields for agricultural labour, and later went with her into the forested hills behind
their home to gather firewood – some for their own use and some for sale. Two
days of foraging could yield women here firewood worth Rs. 200. “Enough to buy
us oil and salt for a few days,” says Meena’s mother Rani. Sonu used to also help herd the family’s 8 to 10 goats. Over and above
these tasks, she helps her mother cook and complete household chores. 

Both
Sonu and Meena’s parents work as agricultural labourers. The daily rate
around here is Rs. 150 for women and Rs. 200 for men. That is, when they can
find work, which at the best of times means 10-12 days in a month. Sonu’s
father Ramswaroop used to travel to nearby towns and cities, even Prayagraj, to
find wage work until he got tuberculosis towards the end of 2020 and died the
same year.   

“We
spent around 20,000 rupees on his treatment – I had to borrow the money from
family and others,” says Champa. “As his health deteriorated and we needed more
money, I would sell a goat for around 2,000 to 2,500 rupees. We kept only this
one,” she adds, pointing to the lone tethered kid in the room behind them.

“It was after my father died that my mother
began to talk of my marriage,” says
Sonu quietly, staring at the fading mehendi on her hands.

Sonu
and Meena’s mothers – Champa and Rani – are sisters, who married two brothers.
Their joint family of 25 people lives in a couple of rooms built under the
Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana housing scheme in 2017, with walls of exposed
brick and a cement roof. Their older homes of mud and thatch, where they cook and where some of them still
sleep, stand right behind these. 

Meena
was the first of the two cousins to start menstruating and it helped that the
boy they found for her had a brother. The alliance was fixed for Sonu as
well to marry into the same house – a point of comfort for the mothers.  

Meena
is the eldest in her family and has two sisters and a brother. She dropped out
of school in Class 7, more than a year ago. “I used to have some pain in my
stomach. I would lie at home most of the day. My mother would be out in the
fields and my father would go for wage work to Koraon. Nobody insisted I go to
school, so I didn’t go,” she says. Later, she was diagnosed with kidney stones,
but the treatment was too expensive and required several trips to the district
headquarters 30 kilometres away, so the idea was dropped. And so too, with it,
was her education.  

She
still has occasional pain in the abdomen. 

Even
from their meagre earnings, most of the Kol families struggle to put aside some
money for their daughters’ wedding day. “We have saved around 10,000 rupees for
their marriage. We will have to give a feast for 100-150 people – poori, sabzi and meetha,” says Rani. The
idea seems to be that both girls will be married on the same day, in the same
event, to the two brothers.

The parents
believe that they will be done with their responsibilities and the girls with
their childhood. Sonu and Meena have their own logic, shaped by their
circumstances and social conditioning: “Khana
kam banana padega. Ham toh ek samasya hain ab,” they say. “There will be
fewer mouths to feed. We are a problem right now.”

07-child-marriage-PD-In_UP-Our_village_lives_in_another_era.jpg

<a href="https://www.unicef.org/india/what-we-do/end-child-marriage">Child marriage</a>, notes UNICEF,
puts young girls at high risk of dying due to complications at childbirth and
during pregnancy. With girls here being married off so young, “there is no
chance to check iron or give them folic acid tablets,” says ASHA worker Sunita
Devi, referring to the standard protocol for new mothers-to-be. In fact, only 22 per cent of young mothers in
rural Uttar Pradesh will have ante-natal visits – the lowest such figure for any
state in the country. That number appears in <a href="https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&amp;rct=j&amp;q=&amp;esrc=s&amp;source=web&amp;cd=&amp;ved=2ahUKEwicoKq23MHzAhXEyjgGHSU5B-IQFnoECAcQAQ&amp;url=https%3A%2F%2Fmain.mohfw.gov.in%2Fsites%2Fdefault%2Ffiles%2FHealthandFamilyWelfarestatisticsinIndia201920.pdf&amp;usg=AOvVaw0ihXO0TdOuY_0Li4lCj1P9">a recent report</a> published by the
union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The report also records that over
half the women in UP – 52 per cent – in the 15-49 age group are anaemic –
which places them at heightened health risk
during pregnancy, as it does the children they bear. Besides, 49 per cent of all rural children in UP under the age of 5 are stunted
and 62 per cent are anaemic – perpetuating a cycle of ill-health and risk. “Girls’ nutrition is not at all a priority. I
have seen that they stop giving the girl child milk once her marriage is fixed,
as they feel she will be going away. Any saving is welcome, such is their majboori [compulsion],” observes Sunita.  Rani and Champa’s minds, however, are focused elsewhere
at this time. “We are worried that the money we have put together should not get stolen before the wedding. People know we have the cash with
us,” says Rani. “I will also have to take a loan of around 50,000 rupees.” With
that, she believes, the ‘problem&#39; dogging them “will be over.”   



The reporter thanks
Prof Arif A. Broadway, Director of Extension Services at SHUATS, Allahabad, for
his invaluable help and inputs. 

The
names of some people in this story have been
changed to protect their identities.PARI and CounterMedia Trust&#39;s nationwide reporting project on adolescent girls and young women in rural India is part of a Population Foundation of India-supported initiative to explore the situation of these vital yet marginalised groups, through the voices and lived experience of ordinary people. Want to republish this article? Please write to <a href="mailto:zahra@ruralindiaonline.org">zahra@ruralindiaonline.org </a>with a cc to <a href="mailto:namita@ruralindiaonline.org">namita@ruralindiaonline.org</a>.

In UP: ‘Our village lives in another era’

यूपी: ‘हमरा हाथरस के डर हरमेसा लागल रहेला’

‘हमर गाँव कऊनो दूसर जुग मं रहत हवय’

યુપી: ‘અમારું ગામ હજુ પણ જુના જમાનામાં જીવે છે’

ഉത്തര്‍പ്രദേശ്‌: ‘ഞങ്ങളുടെ ഗ്രാമം മറ്റൊരു യുഗത്തിലാണ് ജീവിക്കുന്നത്’

یوپی: ’ہمارا گاؤں کسی اور دور میں جی رہا ہے‘

ಉತ್ತರ ಪ್ರದೇಶ: ʼನಮ್ಮ ಊರು ಬೇರೊಂದು ಯುಗದಲ್ಲಿ ಬದುಕುತ್ತಿದೆʼ

উত্তৰ প্ৰদেশৰ এখন 'এলান্ধুক’লীয়া গাওঁ’

యు.పి లో: ‘మా గ్రామం వేరే శకంలో బ్రతుకుతుంది’

উত্তরপ্রদেশ: ‘মান্ধাতার যুগেই পড়ে আছে আমাদের গ্রাম’

‘आमचं गाव वेगळ्याच जमान्यात जगतं’

ଉତ୍ତରପ୍ରଦେଶରେ: ‘ଆମ ଗାଁ ଭିନ୍ନ ଏକ ଯୁଗରେ ବାସ କରୁଛି’

ਯੂਪੀ: 'ਬਾਲ ਵਿਆਹ ਇੱਕ ਦਿਲ-ਵਲੂੰਧਰੂ ਵਰਤਾਰਾ'

यूपी: हाथरस जैसे मामलों के डर से दलितों में बढ़ रहा बाल विवाह का चलन

‘எங்களின் கிராமம் வேறொரு யுகத்தில் வாழ்கிறது’

Prayagraj

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In UP: ‘Our village lives in another era’

The story of Sonu and Meena, who will soon be married though they’ve barely entered their teens, is also that of many other menstruating girls from Dalit hamlets in rural Prayagraj

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