Child marriage violates every human right to which a child is entitled. Girls and boys who are married early are most likely to drop out of school and discontinue formal education. They are also likely to be pushed into early childbearing, which increases the risk of maternal mortality, morbidity and infant death, and malnutrition for the mother and child.
The state of Odisha ranks 13th among states with 21.3% child marriages – highest reported in the district of Malkangiri, i.e. 39.3% and Koraput places itself in the red zone with a total of 34.7% child marriage. In terms of the locality, child marriages are more rapidly taking place in rural, hard to reach and semi-urban areas. It’s close to 1% in the urban area compared to 34% in the rural area of Koraput.
What Has Been Done To Curb It?
The Women and Child Welfare department and Mission Shakti department of the Government of Odisha with the support of UNICEF and Action Aid provide technical support to reduce child marriage rate in the districts with high child marriage rates. The development partners help the district administration to strengthen the district task force aiming at joint action against child marriage.
In a meeting on 14 October 2019, the DM and Collector of Koraput launched a flagship initiative on a campaign mode to reduce child marriage in the district. In the later phase, with the support of Action Aid, they developed a year-long awareness plan with detailed quarterly implementation and monitoring strategies.
The campaign has been designed to eradicate child marriage from the district entirely. It will also include activities such as training, events, outreach activities, media liaison and public relation strategies.
The initiative has been named as Aparajita: A Campaign to End Child Marriage in the district. Aparajita means a girl who is never defeated to the multifarious pressures/male-dominated socio-cultural and physical hegemony to submit to early marriage.
Objectives Of The Campaign:
- To empower children to be able to respond and prevent child marriage.
- To influence positive change in communities’ beliefs and social norms that drive child marriage.
- To accelerate access to adolescents, particularly girls, to quality education, reproductive health services and other opportunities.
- To ensure national laws, policy frameworks, and mechanisms related to ending child marriage are in place and effectively implemented.
- Advocate for women as community leaders.
- To make convergence campaign plan with all the line departments to engage all the stakeholders.
The campaign was launched on the eve of Children’s day, thereby symbolizing the importance of child rights and dignity. The campaign comes with a song which was recorded and spread in local languages in Koraput district. The plan is such that all the concerned stakeholders have to assist for 100 hours in three months with checks and balances at every stage to ensure implementation.
Five adolescents who have said no to their marriage were declared as the Aparajita brand ambassadors and were felicitated during PARAB 2019. Further, three girls were given ₹5000. The district administration also announced they would provide a scholarship amount for the higher education of the campaign brand ambassadors.
What More?
This campaign covers the whole of Koraput district and has plans to involve multi-level governance systems. Anganwadi workers have also pledged to stop child marriage. The campaign further aims to involve school teaches and students to fight against child marriage. Under the campaign, district administration started the “Mu Paribi” program to engage the adolescent boys and girls twice in a month.
This campaign was selected for the Soch award and was the runners up. It was also nominated for Prime Minister Awards for Excellence in Public Administration 2020. With its success, child marriage can be completely eradicated from Koraput, and girls can receive an education.