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Age at First Marriage in India: A history of 25 years

Mayank Singh, Kle University

Throughout history, child marriages have been very common in developing countries. It is a serious societal problem and a denial of children’s rights, regardless of whether the child is a female or a male. The study aims to know about the trends and differentials in the age pattern of marriage in India. All four rounds of NFHS were used as a data source. Choropleth map for median age, Kaplan Meier Failure curve and Cox Proportional hazard regression were used as a statistical analysis. Marriage before the legal age of 18 is reduces form 67.7% in 1992-92 to 39.1% in 2015-16 among the women aged 20-49. While going through the birth cohort we see that in each round of national family health survey older is the birth cohort higher is the prevalence of child marriage. Education and wealth index were two most important predictors of median age marriage. The sharpest increase in the probability of marriage were found after the age 13 in NFHS-1 and 15 years in NFHS-4. Among all rounds of the survey, it has been found that as the education increasing in women’s the likelihood of marriage at any point in time were decreases.

Keywords: Age structure, Event history analysis, Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights

See extended abstract.

  Presented in Session P8.