Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Friday said that the government would soon reach a consensus on revising the minimum age of marriage for girls. The Prime Minister said the girls’ gross enrolment ratio in education has turned higher than that of boys for the first time in the country because of several efforts taken by the government in the last six years.
PM Modi was addressing a video conference after releasing a commemorative coin of ₹75 denomination on the 75th anniversary of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
“There is an important deliberation going on to decide what should be the ideal age of marriage for daughters,” Modi said. He said that deliberations were going on in the government regarding the same and that consensus will be reached soon. This is a follow-through of his Independence Day speech, wherein he had addressed the need for increasing the minimum marriage age for women in India. He had announced that the government has set up a committee to look into the matter.
Even in the Parliament, the government has appointed a task force had been constituted “to examine the correlation of the age of marriage and motherhood”. The current legal age of marriage for women is 18, while that of men is 21.