Child marriage in India falls to one in five young women, as violence from husbands drops from 29 to 22 percent

One in five. That is the share of young Indian women who were married as children in the newest national survey, and the figure keeps falling. Between May 2023 and December 2024, fieldworkers for India's sixth National Family Health Survey gathered information from 679,238 households, 716,397 women and 100,977 men. Among women aged 20 to 24, 20.1 percent had been married before 18, down from 23.3 percent in the previous round in 2019-21 and 26.8 percent in 2015-16. That is the standard measure of child marriage, a formal marriage or informal union before the age of 18.

The same survey found a sharper change inside marriages. Among women aged 18 to 49 who have ever been married, the share who had ever experienced physical or sexual violence from a husband fell from 29.2 percent to 22.3 percent. Young men are marrying later too: 15.9 percent of men aged 25 to 29 had married before 21, the legal minimum age for men, down from 17.7 percent.

How we know

The figures come from the national fact sheet of NFHS-6, run by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare with the International Institute for Population Sciences in Mumbai as the lead agency, and released on 29 May 2026. Fieldwork ran in two phases, from 28 May 2023 to 26 February 2024 and from 7 February to 31 December 2024. Each round asks the same questions, which is what makes the comparison possible: the fact sheet prints the 2019-21 value beside each 2023-24 one, and the 2015-16 report gives 26.8 percent for the same age group. For the round before that, Scroll.in's analysis of the series puts the 2005-06 figure at 47.4 percent, close to half. The survey team says the fact sheet results are provisional and that smaller states have smaller samples, so their figures deserve more caution.

The measure is chosen with care. Asking girls aged 15 to 19 would miss those who will still marry before their 18th birthday, so surveys look instead at women aged 20 to 24, who have all passed 18 but married recently enough to show the current picture. The violence figures come from questions put to women aged 18 to 49 who have ever been married, and count physical violence, sexual violence or both by a husband. The legal minimum age of marriage in India is 18 for women and 21 for men, which is why the survey reports the two sexes against different ages.

Why it matters

UNICEF links child marriage to interrupted schooling, early pregnancy, isolation and a higher risk of domestic violence, so each point of decline stands for a very large number of lives in a country of India's size. The progress is uneven. In cities 11.4 percent of young women married before 18, against 23.3 percent in villages. West Bengal, at 36.4 percent, Bihar, at 34.6 percent, and Tripura, at 34.0 percent, remain far above Kerala's 2.9 percent, though all three fell from above 40 percent in 2019-21.

Other figures in the same survey moved in the same direction, though the survey does not link them to marriage. The share of women aged 15 to 49 with ten or more years of schooling rose from 41.0 to 46.4 percent. The share who have ever used the internet nearly doubled, from 33.3 to 64.3 percent, and the share with a bank or savings account they use themselves rose from 78.6 to 89.0 percent. The gaps between town and village remain wide. In 2023-24, 17.5 percent of married women in cities had faced violence from a husband, against 24.4 percent in rural areas, and 3.4 percent of women aged 15 to 19 in cities were already mothers or pregnant, against 7.9 percent in villages. Where child marriage persists, Scroll.in's analysis points to poverty and social norms, and it notes the practice rose in Punjab, from 8.7 to 10.2 percent.

The survey measures the change without explaining it. What it does show is that child marriage in India has been falling for two decades, and that the states still carrying most of it now have a clear number to beat.