Locked up in a room for a week before being forcibly married off in filmi-style to a cousin, a 15-year-old girl was rescued by the police in Ariyalur and promised help to return to school.
The police said the Class 10 student was forced by her mother into marrying her 19-year-old cousin so as to unburden responsibilities since her husband died and the family was poor.
Putting up a stiff fight against her family, Geetha (name changed) appro-ached the local social welfare officials who took her to the police station and lodged a complaint.
The mother, the groom and his parents have gone missing after the police registered a case of child marriage and sent the girl to be with a kind relative recently.
Ariyalur SP Najmul Hoda said, “The girl was kept locked up in a room in the house of her father-in-law, who’s her mother’s brother, for a week before the marriage took place. It appears that the mother decided to marry off the girl as soon as her husband died. She thought her daughter would then be safer. This situation is not uncommon among the rural poor.”
He promised to help Geetha to continue her studies.
Reacting to the child marriage incident, R.Vasuki, commissioner, state social welfare department, said Geetha’s marriage was null and void in legal terms as the girl was barely 15.
“It is against law to marry off a girl child before she turns 18. We will take up this Ariyalur case very strongly,” said the senior bureaucrat here.
Though the “National Plan for Children 2005” had aimed at abolishing child marriage by 2010, a recent study by the Population Council of India said about a fifth of the women population in the country were found to have been married before turning 15 and around 50 per cent before reaching 18, the legal marriageable age.