The girl who said
Rekha Kalindi is a 13-year-old girl who lives in a village in northeastern India. She is about 1.30 m tall with long dark hair which she wears in a ponytail. She lives in an area with the highest female illiteracy in India. Her home has no electricity, no running water and no toilet. She goes to school like most 13-year-olds around the world. Rekha Kalindi is an ordinary poor Indian schoolgirl. However, in 2008, this ordinary young girl did something extraordinary.
NO!
When she was 12, Rekha Kalindi’s parents arranged her marriage to a local man. But Rekha was not happy about the arrangement. She knew her future as a child bride. If she married the man, she would become a housewife and a mother, like her sister, Jyotsna. ‘She got married at 12,’ Rekha said. ‘She is 15 now and she has already had four dead babies.’ Rekha took a brave decision. She said no. The bravery of this young girl changed behaviour in her village and may change attitudes in her country in a dramatic way.
Rekha grew up in one of India’s poorest villages and needed to work from an early age to help her family. She produced a kind of cigarette which is called a beedi. Then, in 2007, she was taken out of child labour and given the chance to learn in a government school. Many parents in India cannot afford to send their children to secondary school, but Rekha’s school is free because it is supported by UNICEF. At school, she learnt the normal subjects of secondary students around the world. In addition, she had a course in leadership skills. It is possible that this course helped Rekha to make her difficult decision.
The arranged marriage between Rekha and her prospective husband was not a problem in itself. Arranged marriages are part of Indian culture, and many people feel that they work very well in most cases. Two families get together and agree that their children will get married at some time in the future. The arrangement was perfectly normal, but the marriage itself was against the law.
The Child Marriage Prohibition Act in India makes it illegal for girls below the age of 18 to marry. The same law forbids the marriage of males under the age of 21. However, a recent study in the UK medical journal The Lancet found that 44.5 per cent of Indian women in their early 20s were married by the age of 18. Of those, 22.6 per cent were married before they were 16, and 2.6 per cent before the age of 13. According to UNICEF, teenage pregnancy and motherhood is nine times higher among women with no education than among women with 12 or more years of education.
The law of India means that Rekha was right to refuse to go through with the marriage. But her refusal had huge consequences. Rekha’s family were shocked by her action. They took her out of school, and even stopped giving her food for two weeks. However, Rekha did not weaken. People in the village began to talk about her, and then people in the state. Finally, she became a national news story. In the spring of 2009, the president of India asked to meet her. Clearly, the president saw her as a national symbol.
Rekha’s decision was unusual, but her original problem is not. There are very large numbers of marriages of underage children, particularly girls, all over the world. However, it shows the power of education. If more girls were educated, would more girls say no to illegal marriages? The answer is probably yes.
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