Child Marriage And The Role of Education: Analysis

Central Idea

• When the Assam government launched a massive crackdown on child marriage, social activists pointed out that the root of the problem, i.e., limited access to education among women, is not being sufficiently addressed. National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data show that higher education levels could play a greater role than wealth in delaying a woman’s marriage. The data also reflect wide variations between the marital age of rural and urban women, and Dalit and upper-caste women.

Does education or wealth play a greater role in determining when a woman gets married?

• Education is significant: Education has a longer history of being significant in delaying a woman’s marriage.
• For instance: Depending on National Family Health Survey (NFHS) data, education has had a steady influence, while poverty has had an increasing influence over time.
• Poverty: Poverty is the greatest determinant of early marriage as the poor do not want to wait due to the increasing demand for dowry. Wealthier people are no longer marrying their daughters early.

What role does marriage play in India?

Marriage plays a significant role in India as it serves multiple purposes.

• Most significant institution: It is considered the most significant institution for daughters as it fulfills the family’s responsibility towards them. For sons, the responsibility is to settle them in a job, which will hopefully lead to marriage.
• Social identity: Marriage is crucial for social identity, and a woman who remains single is an anomaly because almost everyone gets married.
• Sexual respectability: marriage is essential for sexual respectability as those who wish to have social respect have sexual relationships within marriage.
• Legitimate children: Marriage provides the option to have children, and having a child without a husband is completely unacceptable in the Indian context.

What advantages that families see in getting women married earlier instead of educating them further?

• Dowry: This dowry can be a significant financial burden for families, and getting their daughters married early may be seen as a way to reduce this expense. The more educated a girl, the more the boy has to be educated too and the higher the dowry.
• Transfer of responsibility: Families feel there is the responsibility of protecting her sexually before marriage. And that responsibility gets transferred to the boy’s family. After marriage, the girl goes to live with her husband’s family, so why spend on her education?
• Maintenance of caste and community lines: In some cultures, marrying within one’s own caste and community is essential to maintain social status and cultural traditions. Early marriage may be seen as a way to ensure that women are married within their caste and community and preserve cultural practices.

Women are increasingly getting access to education. Does this result in more empowerment?

1. Advantages of Women’s Access to Education:
2. Education provides women with knowledge and skills that lead to greater empowerment and the ability to make informed decisions about their lives.
3. Educated women are more likely to participate in the workforce, earn higher wages, and have better health outcomes.
4. Access to education can challenge traditional gender norms and stereotypes, creating new opportunities for women and girls.
5. Education can increase women’s bargaining power within their families and communities, allowing them to negotiate for better living conditions, higher earnings, and greater autonomy.
6. Challenges in Women’s Employment
7. The female labor force participation rate is low at 25%, and job losses have been especially harmful to women.
8. Despite increased access to education, there is a high proportion of educated but unemployed women.
9. Women who enter the corporate sector often face hostility or are unable to balance domestic expectations with work demands.
10. The conjugal contract between men and women remains largely unchanged, with women assuming the majority of domestic burdens and men often having power over family decisions.
11. Impact of Age of Marriage
12. Increasing the age of marriage may not automatically lead to greater empowerment, autonomy, or freedom for women.
13. While delaying marriage may provide women with more opportunities to pursue education and careers, there is still a significant gender gap in employment and earnings.
14. Low and declining employment rates may also result in a greater burden on marriage as a means of economic security.

Why women in SC/ST/OBC communities get married at  younger age than even those in rural India?

• Socio-economic factors: Women in SC/ST/OBC communities tend to get married at younger ages than even those in rural areas due to a combination of social and economic factors.
• Sense of social disadvantage: Families who belong to these groups experience a sense of social disadvantage in the marriage market, but they are also often poor, with lower wealth quintiles being disproportionately populated by SC, ST, and OBCs.
• Caste and poverty: There is a fair deal of correlation between caste and poverty in these communities, with many lacking decent work and being vulnerable to violence from those higher in the hierarchy.
• Vulnerability: Girls from these communities are even more vulnerable to such issues, with Dalit girls being particularly susceptible to sexual predators as young upper-caste men feel that they have a right of access.
• Marriage as protection: Marriage can be seen as a form of protection for girls from these communities, but the issue of early marriage is complex and influenced by a range of factors.

Conclusion

• The issue of child marriage in India is complex and deeply rooted in societal norms, poverty, and caste systems. Despite the progress in education and women’s empowerment, there are still challenges. The issue of child marriage requires a comprehensive approach that addresses the underlying societal and economic factors that perpetuate the practice.

Nuclear-powered submarines under AUKUS

Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States unveiled plans to provide Australia with conventionally armed, nuclear-powered attack submarines in the early 2030s to counter China’s ambitions in the Indo-Pacific. The arrangement was made through the Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) enhanced security partnership.

More about deal

1. Under this deal, the United States intends to sell Australia three US Virginia class nuclear-powered submarines built by General Dynamics in the early 2030s, with an option for Australia to buy two more if needed, a joint statement said.
2. However, the multi-stage project will culminate with British and Australian production and operation of a new submarine class – SSN-AUKUS – a trilaterally developed vessel with the best technologies and capabilities of all three countries.
3. Beijing has reacted strongly to the naval deal. Its foreign ministry accused the three nations of “walking further and further down the path of error and danger”.

What is AUKUS?

1. AUKUS is a 2021 defence deal between Australia, the UK and the US, which was struck to help Australia deploy nuclear-powered submarines in the Pacific region. Officially, the deal was made to emphasise upon the countries’ “shared commitment to a free-and-open Indo-Pacific region”. In effect, it seeks to combat China’s ambitions in the region.
2. China has been an aggressive player in the South Pacific and Indian Oceans, staking territorial claims across the resource-rich region which also hosts some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes.
3. China’s increasing aggression against Taiwan and in the South China Sea has been of particular note.
4. While China’s territorial ambitions have elicited strong reactions from across the West, Australia, a traditional centre of influence in the Pacific, has been most directly impacted. Crucially, unlike Australia, China has multiple nuclear-capable submarines.
5. Thus, the AUKUS partnership was signed to bolster Australia’s naval heft in the region. The then Australian PM Scott Morisson, at the time, described AUKUS as a “partnership where our technology, our scientists, our industry, our defence forces are all working together to deliver a safer and more secure region that ultimately benefits all”.

How will nuclear submarines help Australia?

1. Conventional diesel-engine submarines have batteries that keep and propel the vessel underwater. The life of these batteries can vary from a few hours to a few days.
2. While newer Air-Independent Propulsion (AIP) submarines have additional fuel cells that increase the submarine’s endurance, these are used only at strategic times and can only be replenished in port.
3. Both conventional and AIP subs need to come to the surface to recharge their batteries using the diesel engine.
4. Nuclear-powered submarines, on the other hand, have an internal nuclear reactor, giving them near infinite endurance to operate and stay submerged – effectively, a nuclear submarine only needs to port/surface when it is out of food and other essential supplies for the crew. Typically, nuclear subs are also faster than conventional submarines.

Problems with recycling of plastic

With only 9% of annual plastic waste recycled, around 85% of plastic packaging worldwide ends up in landfills. According to Greenpeace, In the United States, which is by far the world’s biggest plastics polluter, only around 5% of over 50 million tons of plastic waste produced by households in 2021 was recycled.

More about the news:

Lacking at various stakeholders:

• With plastic production set to triple globally by 2060, plastics made primarily from oil or gas is a growing source of the carbon pollution fuelling climate change. Much is also ending up in oceans and severely impacting marine life.
• Promises by major plastics producers, to promote recycling and include more recycled plastic in their containers have been mostly broken.
• The plastics lobby, along with supermarkets in countries from Austria to Spain, sometimes avoid this responsibility by lobbying against deposit return schemes that include plastic bottles.

Separating seven types of plastic doesn’t add up:

v  Most plastic packaging is produced from seven grades of plastic that are largely incompatible with each other, and are costly to sort for recycling.

v  According to Greenpeace, apart from PET, or Polyethylene terephthalate, the world’s most common plastic labelled with#1, and high-density Polyethylene (HDPE), which carries the #2 symbol, five other plastic types might be collected but are rarely recycled.

v  It is because PET is the most recyclable plastic and there is a strong market for its by-product used to make drink bottles, food containers or fibers for clothes. But the harder plastics numbered 3-7 have a very small market since the value of the raw material is lower than the cost of recycling.

Virgin plastic is too cheap:

Ø  The post-consumer plastic resin created from recycled material is being undercut by cheaper prime material, limiting the market for recycled plastics.

Ø  Due to rising transport costs for recycling businesses in Asia and a slowdown in the construction sector that creates plastic building materials.

Lightweight ‘flexible’ packaging booming but non-recyclable

v  The lightweight packets that keep food and snacks likes chips or chocolate bars, constitute around 40% of the world’s plastic packaging, known as flexible packaging, the lightweight, multi-layered single-use packets are used to wrap around 215 billion products in the UK alone.

v  Flexible packaging is also often “super-contaminated” with food waste, which also makes it impossible to recycle.

Banning a part of the solution:

v  In a 2022 survey of over 23,000 people across 34 countries, nearly 80% would support banning types of plastic that cannot be easily recycled.

v  It would include a global ban on products and materials made from hard-to-recycle plastics.

v  Authors of the survey, conducted by international conservation organisation WWF and Australian-based campaigners Plastic Free Foundation, said “any meaningful progress in reducing global plastic waste” needs to include bans of “the most harmful and problematic types of single-use plastics, fishing gear, and micro plastics.”

v  The EU has made some steps in this direction, having banned 10 single-use plastics products that not only blight Europe’s beaches but contravene a circular economy model via which all disposable plastics in the EU will be reusable or recyclable by 2030.

v  More than 30 African countries have either completely or partially banned lightweight plastic bags.

v  One goal of a global plastics treaty will be to harmonize these piecemeal bans into a coherent worldwide regulation.

First major FDI project in Jammu- Kashmir

Dubai-based Emaar, a real estate developer from the United Arab Emirates (UAE), has become the first overseas company to invest in a mega-mall spread over 10 lakh square feet in Srinagar, a first since the Centre ended Jammu and Kashmir’s special constitutional position in 2019.

More about the news:

• The lieutenant Governor said the project is seen as a new dawn of limitless possibilities. It will promote the development of J&K.
• It will have a transformative impact on the Union Territory (UT) and boost the infrastructure, employment generation and ease of living.

First major FDI:

ü  The mega-mall is the first significant Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) investment in Jammu and Kashmir.

ü  The Emaar group plans to invest ₹250 crore to set up the mega-mall, tipped to be one of the largest malls in the region with over 500 shops.

ü  It is a joint venture of Emaar and Delhi-based real estate firm Magna Waves Build-Tech; the mall is likely to become operational by 2026.

ü  The Emaar group will also invest in setting up IT towers in Jammu and Srinagar. The investment will touch ₹500 crore.

Its impact:

v  The L-G said that the mall and the allied projects with the government of Dubai would not only fuel the economic growth of J&K, but also help achieve the shared vision of strengthening bilateral trade and investment ties between India and the UAE.

v  It will bring along strong relationships with leading retail brands of UAE, most of which will be launching their presence in India through this initiative.

Spurring investment:

Ø  After the implementation of the New Industrial Policy, J&K has received investment proposals from more than 5,000 domestic and foreign companies.

Ø  On average, every day, eight companies have expressed their willingness to invest in J&K, the L-G said. “A new industry is becoming operational in the UT every day. Last month, 45 industries started their operations.

Billion dollar deal:

• In January 2022, during an investor meet at Dubai, the J&K Government had entered into a bilateral agreement with various stakeholders and the government of the UAE to deliver over a billion dollars’ worth of projects in the valley.
• According to the J&K government, these projects include the development of industrial parks, a medical college, a specialty hospital, logistics centres, IT towers, and multipurpose towers.