Upgrading of school pushes up hope of putting an end to child marriage

A majority of villagers were unwilling to send their daughters to schools located up to eight km away

All the girl students were present at the newly upgraded High School in Jambumadai in Namakkal district in the first day of the academic year on Friday.

When Friday was just a school re-opening day for others, it was different for eight girls and 11 boys of Class IX at the government school in Vadavathur Panchayat of Jambumadai village in Namakkal district.

The boys and girls are the first batch of students from this village to go beyond Class VIII in the local school, which was upgraded to a high school as part of measures to prevent child marriages in the village.

A majority of the villagers had been unwilling to send their daughters to schools, six-to-eight km from Jambumadai. This resulted in the girls getting married off soon after completing Class VIII.

Of late, some child marriages were prevented by the administration and the police. Upgradation of the school was suggested as a key measure to stop child marriages so that the children would continue studying.

Teachers and Education Department officials said that 100 per cent attendance on the first day meant that no child marriage was performed in that village this year. Some of the girls, who managed to join schools in other areas last year after Class VIII, will return to Jambumadai and join Class X in the upgraded school on Monday.

A helpline (phone number) at the District Collector's Camp Office has received some calls that helped prevent child marriages. But, there are no records of how many marriages have taken place and how many have been prevented.

“We go to the spot and prevent the marriage but we have not kept count of how many marriages we have prevented”, a revenue official said. “When it is stopped, we warn the parents of the consequences they will face if they perform a child marriage. But, the incident is not recorded”, he adds.

The trend in Jambumadai came into sharp focus when five marriages were reported between June 8 and 12 in 2011. That is when some strong interventions began.

“Child marriages were mostly organised in May as parents did not show much interest in the higher education of the girls”, says D. Arokiamary, who has been teaching in the school for 14 years. She recalls that last year too, three such marriages were performed in May, but went unnoticed, taking the total number of child marriages in that hamlet to eight in 2011.