Even though child marriage is banned in India, !,71,083 girls and 1,72,934 boys got married before reaching the legal marriage age in the last five years in the state of Andhra Pradesh itself. Krishna district tops the State wide list of child marriages with 20,584 girls (3.3% of the girls of all) and 19,557 boys (2.4% of boys of all) getting married before attaining 18 and 21 years of age. Visakhapatnam district stands second along with marriage of 16,876 girls below 18 i.e. the legal age, followed by Anantapur (16,738), Kurnool (16,532) and Chittoor (15,769), according to an analysis on the incidence and intensity of child marriages at the national, State and district levels, by the National Commission for Protection of Child Rights (NCPCR) in collaboration with Young Lives India. This information was represented at the state level consultation on child marriages held here yesterday. In the same way, 20,462 boys below legal age were married in Kurnool, followed by 17,322 in Visakhapatnam and 16,939 in Anantapur districts. India stands 11th in the worldwide rank of countries with high percentage of child marriages, accounting for a high 47% of all children while Nigeria stands in the first place with 68%. The NCPCR and YLI collaborative study said, a huge number of 39,000 minor girls are being married every day in India. The Andhra Pradesh Women and Child Welfare, Police and Revenue departments have been taking many steps to prevent child marriages but there is still a long way to go before the practice of child marriages id eradicated from the country. In all, 2,322 child marriages were foiled in the last three years by these departments and about 25 cases booked under the Prohibition of Child Marriages Act, 2006.
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