[img_assist|nid=3001|title=|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=100|height=96]Akha Teej is one of the most auspicious days in the Indian calendar. This day in April/May ensures that wedding bells toll en masse—even obliterating the need for an astrologer, who is otherwise an important figure in many Indian weddings. But this day is also infamous for the mass child marriages that occur in northern India on the same day. Despite a pre-independence enactment prompted by Mahatma Gandhi and leading to the subsequent 1978 statute (Child Marriage Restraint Act) on the legal marriageable age, this practise continues unabated across the country. Most other states, however, do not have an anointed date for the practice.

Legislation loses out in the face of social customs; at a recent political function, a prominent politician of the ruling party in Uttar Pradesh (north India) hosted a mass marriage as evidence of his sense of social responsibility to the girls of the state. The context is that the marriage of a young girl is seen as the biggest social and financial burden a man can carry. Less important here was that many of the brides were actually underage by constitutional standards. Challenging this social norm can be dangerous; a government-run welfare centre supervisor was brutally attacked in a district of Madhya Pradesh (central India) some years back for her persistent efforts within local communities to end child marriages.

And in true Bollywood film style, which ends with the start of an ostensibly happy married life for the protagonists, all the concerns regarding these girls also end once their marriages are solemnised and they become the responsibilities of the in-laws. While it is true that in Rajasthan (western India)—the worst offenders in this regard—child brides are not immediately sent to their marital homes, the postponement is until the onset of puberty. And because marriage comes early in life, girls' education is either not considered worth spending money on at all (many parents feel it reduces the possibilities of finding a groom) or it is truncated as the in-laws very rarely spend more than what is needed to feed her. Thus, the absence of education handicaps them in making informed sexual and reproductive health decisions.

Moreover, initiatives dealing with these issues have tended to be disproportionate in the way they address select groups. More often than not, premarital sexual activity as a practice and the unmarried as a target group, get more attention because of the assumption that sex within the realms of marriage is bound to be safe for women. It is also felt that married women are saved the stigma that their unmarried counterparts face while accessing sexual-reproductive health services. The fact is that the set of vulnerabilities for both vary. Contraception between married couples in rural and semi-urban India is still taboo and seen as something that only sex workers need—or else it's for furtive sexcapades. Therefore, the fact that these health services exist is no indication that married women necessarily access them.

While the groom might be a child himself when wedded (though this is not the norm), the age-gap between the two invariably is so huge that by the time the girl reaches puberty or adolescence the husband—a full grown adult—starts putting marital pressures on her. And though sexual initiation for most girls is still through matrimony, it might not be the case with their husbands. Moreover, the institution almost immediately places on her the pressure of proving her fertility—putting her at higher risk with regular, unsafe sex and the obvious unlikelihood of using condoms. Infections and unwanted pregnancies at a fairly early age are thereby common in early marriages, with the biggest threat coming from their exposure, by default, to the risky pre-marital sexual habits of their husbands, many of which might continue into marriages as well. Narratives of HIV-positive women who have been abandoned (by the dead husband's family) reveal that their only source of risk to the virus appeared to have been the spouse. A survey published in the International Journal of STD AIDS in 2000 revealed that of a selected population of HIV-positive women in Tamil Nadu, 40 percent of those infected belonged to the 18-25 age-group; of these 95 percent were married, reflecting a correlation between marriage and the incidence of the infection. What compounds the situation further is the lack of knowledge of the spouse's medical history or of the virus (and also other sexually transmitted infections), resulting in infection of the unborn child as well.

A study published by UNAIDS in 2006 shows that the youth constitute a significant proportion of the HIV population in the country, with over 35 percent of all reported HIV infections in India occurring among the 15-24 age group. In the case of married women, those who married early were more susceptible to it than older women due to the lack of decision-making in sexual relations.

Instances of adolescent girls single-handedly taking a stand against both the family and community in resisting early marriages indeed makes for heartening stories—especially in the context of the vulnerability of young, married girls to both HIV, sexually transmitted infections and other reproductive health concerns. Though also an indication of how slow the process continues to be still today in India's hinterlands—even as globalisation continues to deepen the gash between rural and urban India—yet those little girls continue to inspire hope.