If you thought child marriages are largely history in India or fast disappearing at any rate, Census 2001 has a different story to tell. Data on marital status released recently reveals that 6.4 million Indians under the age of 18 are already married. And if one takes into account the legal marriageable age (18 for females and 21 for males), the data is even more shocking 11.7 million (4.9 million females and 6.9 million males) married underage.

That's not all. As many as 1.3 lakh girls under 18 are already widowed and another 56,000-odd have been divorced or separated. Similarly, among men under 21, 90,000-odd have already lost their wives and more than 75,000 have seen their marriages break up. The total number of under-aged men and women who have been married at least once thus rises to about 12.1 million.The data also indicates that bigamy or polygamy, despite being illegal, is not quite as uncommon as we might assume and nor is it confined to any one community. Among those enumerated as married at the time of the Census, women outnumbered men by about 5 million.

Since monogamous marriages would mean exactly the same number of married men and women, this is obvious evidence of polygamy. There could, therefore, be up to 10 million Indian women living in bigamous marriages.The incidence of child marriages is expectedly higher in rural India, but not as low as you might expect in the towns and cities. Rural India with a share of about 75 per cent among total males aged below 21 and females aged below 18 has a high 83 per cent of the underage married population.

But that still leaves 2 million underaged married people in urban India. Another counter-intuitive finding is that the proportion of divorced/separated persons in urban areas (24.5 per cent) is lower than the share of total urban population (27.8 per cent). Clearly, broken marriages are not just a modern metropolitan phenomenon and the countryside has more than its fair share of them.Child marriages seem to be more common among Hindus than in other religious denominations, though they are by no means unknown in any community. Hindus account for 79 per cent of the total population below the legal age of marriage, but account for 84.7 per cent of all persons married before this age.

Muslims have a 15.4 per cent share in the population of those below the legal marriage age, but a relatively lower share of 12.2 per cent among those married before the legal age. Christians with just under 1 per cent of those married before the legal age and Jains with a 0.1 per cent share have the lowest ratios when one compares with their overall population in this age bracket.As for the "extra" married women ^ those in bigamous or polygamous marriages 3.6 million of them are among Hindus, a little less than 1 million are Muslims, around 2.4 lakh are Christians, while the numbers for the other communities are in tens of thousands. While the share of Muslims is, thus, higher than their share in population, it is not as if they are the only community where this form of marriage is practiced.

Statewise comparison of the data on underaged marriages shows quite clearly that the worst on this parameter are the Hindi-speaking states. In Rajasthan, for instance, roughly one in every 18 people below the legal age of marriages is already in wedlock. In Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Haryana, the ratio varies between 1 in 27 and 1 in 37.At the other end of the spectrum, only 1 in 123 people below the legal age is married in Kerala. [SOurce: Times News Network]