Key Details
Rajasthan’s State Strategy and Action Plan for Prevention of Child Marriage established a ten-year framework beginning in 2017. It sought to combine prevention, enforcement and support for children already affected by early marriage.
Area | Strategy and Its Significance |
|---|---|
Overall goal | Make Rajasthan child-marriage-free by preventing new marriages and providing legal, educational, health and socio-economic support to affected children. |
Underlying approach | Treats child marriage as the outcome of gender discrimination, poverty, social norms, safety concerns, school exclusion and limited opportunities—not only weak enforcement. |
Geographical targeting | Proposes different interventions for districts with high, medium and low prevalence rather than applying a uniform State-wide model. |
Education | Seeks to improve girls’ retention in secondary education, monitor dropouts and integrate rights, life skills and child-marriage awareness into curricula. |
Economic opportunities | Connects adolescents with vocational training, career counselling, financial literacy and entrepreneurship. |
Legal enforcement | Calls for continuous training of Child Marriage Prohibition Officers, police, marriage-registration officials and child-protection institutions. |
Community governance | Assigns Gram Panchayat Action Groups responsibility for monitoring risks, raising the issue in Gram Sabhas and preventing marriages locally. |
Data systems | Proposes stronger birth and marriage registration, district dashboards, grievance tracking and links between education, health and child-protection data. |
Implementation structure | Creates committees and action groups from the State to Gram Panchayat level, supported by a proposed Technical Support Unit. |
Monitoring limitation | Lists numerous indicators but provides few quantified interim targets against which implementation can be assessed. |
The Strategy Addressed the Drivers of Child Marriage, Not Just Its Enforcement
The 2017 State Strategy and Action Plan for Prevention of Child Marriage recognised that criminal enforcementand last-minute intervention alone cannot eliminate child marriage.
Instead, it identified multiple underlying drivers, including:
low social and economic value assigned to girls;
limited access to secondary education;
concerns over girls' safety;
poverty, dowry and marriage expenses;
practices such as bride exchange;
weak awareness and enforcement of child-protection laws; and
limited agency, information and livelihood opportunities for adolescents.
Accordingly, the Strategy combined legal enforcement with interventions in education, healthcare, livelihoods, social norms and adolescent empowerment, treating child marriage as a development and gender-equality challenge, not merely a criminal offence.
Progress Is Visible but the Original Goal Remains Distant
The strategy relied on data available at the time:
Census 2011 indicated that 31.6% of girls in Rajasthan had married before 18 within the relevant reference period.
NFHS-4, conducted in 2015–16, estimated that 35.4% of women aged 20–24 had married before 18.
The document used these figures to classify districts by prevalence and prioritise interventions.
NFHS-5, conducted during 2019–21, subsequently placed the corresponding Rajasthan indicator at 25.4%, a decline of ten percentage points from NFHS-4. The national figure was 23.3%.
The decline represents meaningful progress, but the latest comparable official figure predates the end of the strategy’s ten-year period. It cannot establish Rajasthan’s position in 2026 or determine how much of the change resulted from this particular Action Plan. A credible end-period review would require updated State and district estimates alongside programme and administrative data.
Implementation Relied on Multi-Level Local Institutions
The Strategy established a multi-tier institutional framework spanning the State, district, block and Gram Panchayatlevels, supported by teachers, ASHAs, Anganwadi workers, self-help groups and other community institutions.
This recognised that preventing child marriage depends on early local identification, community participation and coordination across departments. Its effectiveness, however, ultimately depends on whether these institutions function regularly, share information and possess adequate authority and capacity.
Evaluation Must Measure Social Change, Not Administrative Activity
The Strategy proposed outcome indicators such as:
child marriage prevalence;
girls' school retention;
adolescent reproductive health; and
maternal mortality.
However, many monitoring indicators focused on training programmes, awareness campaigns and other administrative activities rather than measurable behavioural change.
A meaningful end-line evaluation should therefore assess:
district-level reductions in child marriage;
improvements in girls' education;
birth and marriage registration;
complaints, interventions and prosecutions; and
whether high-prevalence districts improved faster than comparable areas.
What Does The Child-Marriage Prevalence Indicator Measure?
The commonly used indicator is the percentage of women aged 20–24 who were married before turning 18. It captures marriages that occurred several years before the survey and is therefore not a real-time count of child marriages taking place in the survey year.
Policy Relevance
The framework correctly treats child marriage as a multi-sectoral problem: Education, safety, health, livelihoods and gender norms influence whether legal prohibition works.
The approaching ten-year horizon creates a case for independent evaluation: Implementation should be assessed against district-level outcomes rather than the number of meetings and campaigns conducted.
Updated data are essential: The strategy’s baseline and district classifications are based on surveys and administrative boundaries that are now dated.
School retention is a central preventive intervention: Monitoring should follow girls through the transition from elementary to secondary and higher-secondary education.
Village-level detection must be connected to protection: Reporting mechanisms require confidential referral, legal support and services for children who resist or leave a marriage.
Already-married adolescents cannot be overlooked: Healthcare, education and social-protection access remain necessary even when a marriage could not be prevented.
Local implementation requires accountable coordination: The existence of committees matters less than their meeting frequency, case response, budget use and measurable outcomes.
Follow the Full Strategy Here: Rajasthan’s 2017 State Strategy and Action Plan for Prevention of Child Marriage