| ISSN: 2583-4371 | ISSN: 2583-4371JOURNAL ARTICLE
Abstract: Child marriage remains one of the most entrenched barriers to gender equality and human development in India, even as national prevalence has declined significantly over the past two decades. NFHS-5 (2019–2021) records that 23.3% of women aged 20–24 were married before age 18, a substantial drop from 47.4% in NFHS-3 (2005–06), yet approximately 1.5 million girls continue to enter child marriage each year [1]. Among all documented protective factors, continued secondary education emerges as the single most powerful, consistent, and cost-effective preventive mechanism. This review synthesises evidence from nationally representative surveys, district-level analyses, longitudinal studies, randomised evaluations, and systematic reviews published up to 2023. It demonstrates that each additional year of secondary schooling is associated with a 6–11 percentage point reduction in the probability of child marriage, while full secondary completion is linked to risk reductions of 60–80% compared with no schooling [7,8,9,10]. The analysis distinguishes three interlocking pathways through which education operates: behavioural (prolonged retention physically removes girls from the marriage market during peak risk years), cognitive (acquisition of legal awareness, negotiation skills, and reproductive knowledge), and affective/normative (transformation of personal aspirations and community expectations). Quality moderators—active retention mechanisms, gender-transformative curricula, and community legitimacy consistently differentiate high-impact programmes from those with limited or short-lived effects. Interstate heterogeneity, persistent structural barriers, and post-pandemic setbacks are critically examined. The review concludes that translating education’s preventive potential into large-scale impact requires deliberate policy movement beyond enrolment targets toward high-quality, retention-focused, gender-transformative secondary schooling supported by financial incentives, community engagement, and robust real time monitoring. Sustained investment in adolescent girls’ secondary education offers the highest return for accelerating progress toward SDG 5.3 by 2030.
Keywords: child marriage prevention, girls’ secondary education, school retention, conditional cash transfers, gender norms, NFHS-5, adolescent empowerment, India
Article Info: Received: 24 Jan 2024, Received in revised form: 18 Feb 2024, Accepted: 23 Feb 2024, Available online: 28 Feb 2024
DOI: 10.22161/ijtle.3.1.4
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