In Beed: blowing the whistle on child marriages

Ashok Tangde was scrolling through his phone one afternoon when a WhatsApp notification popped up. It was a digital wedding card with young faces of the bride and groom staring awkwardly into each other’s eyes. The card also included the time, date and venue of the wedding.

But it wasn’t an invitation for Tangde to attend the ceremony.

The card had been sent by one of Tangde’s informants in his district in western India. Along with the wedding card, he had also sent the birth certificate of the bride. She was 17 years old, a minor in the eyes of the law.

On reading the card, the 58-year-old realised that the wedding was about to take place in an hour. He quickly phoned his colleague and friend Tatwasheel Kamble and they jumped in a car.

“It was about half an hour away from where we stay in Beed city,” says Tangde, recalling the incident from June 2023. “On our way, we WhatsApped the images to the local police station and the gram sevak so that we don’t lose any time.”

Tangde and Kamble are child rights activists, acting as whistleblowers in the district of Beed in Maharashtra.

Helping them in their cause are a wide range of informants: from a village boy with a crush on the bride to a school teacher or even a social worker, anyone who understands that child marriage is a crime can be an informant. And over the years, the two activists have cultivated a network of over 2,000 informants across the district who help them track child marriages.

“People started reaching out to us and that’s how we cultivated our informants over the past decade. We regularly get wedding cards on our phone but none of them are invitations,” he chuckles.

With WhatsApp, Kamble says, the informant can simply click a picture of the document and send it across. If the document is not handy, they get in touch with the girl’s school to ask for age-proof. “That way, the informants remain anonymous,” he says. “Before WhatsApp, the informants had to physically gather proof, which was risky. If a person from the village is outed as an informant, people can make their life hell.”

The 42-year-old activist adds that WhatsApp has greatly helped their cause by allowing them to quickly gather evidence and mobilise people at the last minute.

According to the Internet and Mobile Association of India ( IAMAI) report of 2022, out of 759 million active internet users in the country, 399 million are from rural India, most of whom are active on WhatsApp.

“The challenge is to get there on time with the required legal and police machinery, while ensuring that the word of our arrival remains secret,” says Kamble. “Before WhatsApp, that was a much bigger challenge.”

Interactions with the informants at the wedding venue can often be amusing, Tangde chimes in. “We tell them to act normal and not even acknowledge us,” he says. “But not everyone is good at it. We sometimes have to pretend to be rude with the informant in front of everyone so nobody doubts them after we stop the child marriage.”

According to the latest report of National Family Health Survey 2019-21( NFHS 5 ), 23.3 per cent of women between the age of 20-24 in India said they were married before they turned 18 – the legal age for marriage in the country. In Beed, a district with a population of roughly 3 million, the number is almost double the national average – 43.7 per cent. Early marriage is a huge public health concern as it leads to early pregnancy, increasing the chances of maternal mortality and malnutrition.

Early marriages in Beed are closely linked to the bustling sugar industry in the state. The district is the epicentre of sugarcane cutters in Maharashtra. They migrate hundreds of kilometres every year to the western region of the state to chop sugarcane for sugar factories. Many of the labourers belong to the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe communities – among the most marginalised in India.

Due to rising production costs, falling crop prices and climate change, farmers and labourers in this district can no longer rely on farming as their only source of income. They migrate for six months of backbreaking labour which earns them about Rs. 25,000-30,000 (Read: The long road to the sugarcane fields ).

Contractors recruiting these workers prefer to hire married couples as the job requires two people to work in tandem – one to chop the cane and the other to make bundles and load them on the tractor. The couple is treated as one unit, which makes it easier to pay them and avoids conflict between two non-related workers.

“Most of the [sugarcane-cutting] families are forced into it [child marriage] out of desperation to survive. It isn’t black or white,” Tangde says, referring to the practice outlawed under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 . “For the groom’s family, it opens up an extra source of income. For the bride’s family, there is one less stomach to feed,” he explains.

But it means that activists like Tangde and Kamble keep busy.

In Beed district, Tangde is the head of the five-member team of the Child Welfare Committee (CWC), an autonomous institution formed under the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 .. His partner in fighting crime, Kamble, a former CWC member in this district, is currently associated with an NGO working for child rights. “Over the past five years, one of us has had authority and the other has been in the field. We have formed a formidable team,” Tangde says.

Pooja lives with her uncle Sanjay and aunt Rajashree in Beed, sugarcane cutters who have been migrating annually to chop cane for the past 15 years. It was her illegal wedding that Tangde and Kamble had gone to prevent in June 2023.

When the activist duo reached the wedding hall, the gram sevak and the police were already there and chaos had broken out. The bustling celebratory enthusiasm at the location first turned into concerned confusion and then devolved into a funeral-like atmosphere. It dawned on the adults behind the marriage that a police case will be registered against them. “Hundreds of guests were leaving the hall and the families of the bride and groom had fallen at the feet of the police, pleading for forgiveness,” Kamble says.

Sanjay, 35, who had organised the wedding, realised he had made a mistake. “I am a poor sugarcane worker. I couldn’t think of anything else,” he says.

When Pooja and her elder sister Urja were still quite young, their father died in an accident and their mother subsequently remarried. The new family did not accept the girls who were then raised by Sanjay and Rajashree.

After primary school, Sanjay enrolled his nieces in a boarding school in Pune city, about 250 kilometres from Beed.

However, when Urja graduated, the children at the school began to bully Pooja. “They used to make fun of me for ‘speaking like a villager’,” she says. “When my sister was there, she would protect me. After she left, I couldn’t take it anymore and ran away back home.”

After she returned, in November 2022, Sanjay and Rajashree took Pooja with them when they travelled about 500 kilometres to Satara district in western Maharashtra to chop sugarcane for six months. The couple weren’t comfortable leaving her behind all by herself. However, the living conditions at the site are deplorable to say the least, they say.

“We live in makeshift huts made of hay,” Sanjay says. “There are no toilets. We have to relieve ourselves in the fields. We cook food under the open sky after chopping the cane for 18 hours a day. We are used to it after all these years, but Pooja had a tough time.”

Upon their return from Satara, Sanjay found a match for Pooja through his relatives and decided to go ahead with the wedding even though she was a minor. The couple did not have the option of staying at home and finding work nearby.

“The weather is too unpredictable for farming,” Sanjay says. “On our two acres of land, we can now only cultivate food crops for self-consumption. I did what I thought was best for her. We couldn’t take her with us the next time we migrated, and we couldn’t leave her behind fearing for her safety.”

Ashok Tangde first came across this phenomenon of child marriages among sugarcane cutting families in Beed about 15 years ago while travelling across the district with his wife and renowned social activist, Manisha Tokle, whose work centres around women sugarcane cutters.

“When I met some of them with Manisha, I realised that they were all married in their early teens, or even before that,” he says. “That is when I thought we have to work on it exclusively.”

He reached out to Kamble, who also worked in the development sector in Beed, and the two decided to team up.

About 10-12 years ago, when they stopped a child marriage for the first time, it was an act unheard of in Beed.

“People were surprised and they questioned our credibility,” says Tangde. “The adults involved couldn’t believe something like this could happen. There was total societal legitimacy to child marriages. Sometimes, the contractors themselves would pay for the marriage ceremony and take the bride and groom to chop sugarcane.”

The two then started criss-crossing the villages across Beed on buses and a two-wheeler to build a network of people who ended up becoming their informants. The local newspapers also played a critical role in raising awareness as well as popularising their profile in the district, believes Kamble.

Over the past 10 years, they have blown the whistle on over 4,500 child marriages in the district. After they stop the wedding, a police case is registered under The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 against the adults involved. If the marriage is consummated, the man is charged under Protection of Children from Sexual Offences ( POCSO ) while the CWC takes the underage girl under protection.

“We counsel the girl, we counsel the parents and tell them the legal consequences of child marriage,” says Tangde. “Then the CWC follows up with the family every month to ensure the girl isn’t remarried. Most of the parents involved are sugarcane cutters.”

In the first week of June 2023, Tangde received another tip about a child marriage happening in a remote, hilly village in Beed – over two hours from his residence. “I forwarded the documents to my contact in that taluka because I wouldn’t have been able to make it in time,” he says. “He did what needed to be done. My people know the drill now.”

When the authorities reached the location and busted the wedding, they realised that this was the girl’s third marriage. Both the previous marriages had happened within two years of Covid-19. The girl, Laxmi, was just 17.

The outbreak of Covid-19 in March 2020 had been a major setback for Tangde and Kamble’s years of hard work. The lockdown, enforced by the government, shut schools and colleges for an extended period of time, keeping the children at home. A UNICEF report released in March 2021 stated that school closures, rising poverty, parental deaths and other factors resulting from Covid-19 “has made an already difficult situation for millions of girls even worse.”

Tangde experienced it closely in his district of Beed, where underage girls were rampantly married off ( Read: Beed’s child brides: cutting cane, crushing hopes ).

In 2021, during the second round of lockdown in Maharashtra, Laxmi’s mother Vijaymala had found a groom for her daughter in the district of Beed. Laxmi was 15 years old at the time.

“My husband is a drunkard,” says Vijaymala. “Except for the six months when we migrate to cut sugarcane, he doesn’t work much. He comes home high on alcohol and beats me up. When my daughter tries to stop him, he beats her too. I just wanted her to be away from him,” the 30-year-old says.

But Laxmi’s in-laws also turned out to be abusive. A month after getting married, she poured petrol over herself in an attempt to die by suicide to escape from her husband and his family. After that incident, her in-laws dropped her back to her natal home and never returned.

About six months later, in November, it was time for Vijaymala and her husband, Purushottam, 33, to migrate to western Maharashtra to cut cane. They took Laxmi along with them so she could be handy in the labour intensive fields. Laxmi was aware of subpar living conditions at the work site. But nothing could have prepared her for what was to come.

In the sugarcane fields, Purushottam met a man looking to get married. He told him about his daughter, and the man agreed. He was 45 years old. Against the wishes of Laxmi and Vijaymala, he married her off to a man who was nearly thrice her age.

“I implored him not to do this,” says Vijaymala. “But he ignored me totally. I was told to shut up and I couldn’t help my daughter. I didn’t speak to him after that.”

But one month later, Laxmi was back home, the survivor of another abusive marriage. “It was the same story all over again,” she says. “He wanted a maid, not a wife.”

Laxmi lived with her parents for over a year after that. She looked after the household while Vijaymala worked on their small farmland, where the family cultivates pearl millet for self-consumption. “I also work in other people’s farms as a labourer to earn extra,” says Vijaymala. Their monthly income is around Rs.2,500. “My poverty is my bad luck. I have to deal with it,” she adds.

In May 2023, a family member reached out to Vijaymala with a marriage proposal. “The boy was from a good family,” she says. “Financially, they were far better off than us. I thought this would be good for her. I am an illiterate woman. I made a decision to the best of my abilities.” This was the wedding Tangde and Kamble had received a tip about.

Today, Vijaymala says, it wasn’t the right thing to do.

“My father was a drunkard and he married me off at the age of 12,” she says. “Since then, I have been migrating to cut cane with my husband. I had Laxmi when I was a teenager. Without knowing, I did exactly what my father did. The problem is I don’t have anyone to tell me what is right or wrong. I am all alone.”

Laxmi, who has been out of school for the past three years, isn’t keen on going back to her studies. “I have always looked after the house and done household chores,” she says. “I don’t know if I can return to school. I don’t have the confidence.”

Tangde suspects that immediately after Laxmi turns 18, her mother will try to arrange her marriage again. But it might not be that easy.

“The problem with our society is that if a girl has had two failed marriages and one marriage that didn’t go through, people think something is wrong with her,” says Tangde. “Nobody questions the men she was married to. That is why we struggle with an image problem even today. We are seen as people who disrupt a marriage and ruin the girl’s reputation.”

That is exactly how Sanjay and Rajashree perceive the two activists for not letting their niece, Pooja, get married.

“They should have let it happen,” says 33-year-old Rajashree. “It was a good family. They would have looked after her. There is still a year before she turns 18, and they are not willing to wait until then. We had borrowed 2 lakh [rupees] for the wedding. We will just have to suffer the losses.”

Had it been an influential family in the village instead of Sanjay and Rajashree, Tangde says, they would have faced significant hostility. “We have made several enemies for doing our job,” he says. “Every time we get a tip, we do our background checks on the families involved.”

If it’s a family with ties to local politicians, the two phone the administration beforehand and even call for extra backup from the local police station.

“We have been assaulted, insulted and threatened,” says Kamble. “Not everyone accepts their mistake.”

One time, Tangde recalls, the groom’s mother banged her head against the wall in protest, blood oozing out of her forehead. It was an attempt to emotionally blackmail the authorities. “Some guests continued to eat their food sheepishly,” Tangde chuckles. “But it was very difficult to control that family. Sometimes, when we are treated like criminals for intercepting a child marriage, you can’t help but wonder if it’s even worth it,” he says.

But there are also experiences that make it all worthwhile.

In early 2020, Tangde and Kamble had stopped the wedding of a 17-year-old girl. She had appeared for her Class 12 board exams and her poverty-stricken father – a sugarcane cutter – decided it was time to marry her off. But the two activists got to know about the wedding and stopped it in its tracks. It was one of the few weddings they had managed to intercept since the outbreak of Covid-19.

“We followed the drill that we normally do,” Tangde recalls. “We filed a police case, completed the paperwork, and tried to counsel the father. But there is always a danger of the girl being remarried.”

In May 2023, the father of the girl walked into Tangde’s office in Beed. For a minute, Tangde didn’t recognise him. It had been a while since the two had met. The father introduced himself again and told Tangde he had waited for his daughter to be a graduate before setting up her marriage. The boy was approved only after she agreed. He thanked Tangde for his service and handed over a gift-wrapped box.

For once, Tangde had received a wedding card that was an invitation.

Names of the children and their relatives have been changed in the story to protect their identity.

This story was produced with the help of Thomson Reuters Foundation. The content is the sole responsibility of the author and the publisher.