Ripples of change: Villagers get together to stop 13-year-old’s marriage in Purnea

Slow ripples of change to fight child marriages are finally showing in various nooks of the country. The latest example is a village in Purnea, Bihar where the villagers joined hands not to push a child into marriage, but to protest the practice and stop the marriage of a 13-year-old girl.

When the villagers under Maranga police station found out that one of their neighbours was getting their child married to a 17-year-old boy in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, they immediately informed the Kailash Satyarthi Children’s Foundation, Purnea team along with calling the child helpline number as well as the national helpline number.

As a result, the KSCF team along with the helpline team reached the spot at midnight when the groom’s sister-in-law was forcibly conducting the marriage rituals. Thanks to the aware villagers, prompt action by the teams and timely intervention, the marriage was stopped immediately. The clueless young bride, not more than 13-year-old, was sent to children’s home.

Maranga has been geared for change since the clarion call given by Nobel Peace Laureate Kailash Satyarthi to make India child marriage free. On 16 October 2022, the Nobel Peace Laureate had launched the largest ever grassroots level campaign against child marriage, and has been spreading awareness, stopping such marriages and appealing to the governments for further collaborations.

Maranga is one of the 10,000 villages that was part of the campaign when 70,000 women and girls led people in lighting lamps, torchlight procession in the villages from over 500 districts in 26 states.

‘We have trained various women leaders in the village who have been relentlessly working towards making the villagers aware to weed out the practice of child marriage completely. We are finally witnessing the change and more and more villagers are now joining us in our mission. This momentum is what will bring the change we are striving for,” Bidhan Chandra Singh, Spokesperson, KSCF, said.

From the incidents when villagers protested and oftentimes even got violent when activists, NGOs tried to stop child marriages to this latest incident when they took charge to stop this social menace, it is a huge step and probably the beginning of the end of child marriages in India.