Child marriage in the Sundarbans: what every cyclone costs girls
About 42% of young women in West Bengal married before 18. In the Sundarbans, every cyclone pushes more girls into it. The record, and what would help.
On a Saturday morning in June 2020, a reporter from The Telegraph phoned Bunty Mukherjee, a Childline India Foundation worker in the Canning subdivision of South 24 Parganas, to ask about a child marriage that had just been stopped in Basanti block. He could only talk for a few seconds. “Sorry, I’m racing to stop another child marriage in Jharkhali,” he told the paper. Two hours later he called back to say that one had been stopped too.
That was a few weeks after Cyclone Amphan hit the West Bengal coast on 20 May 2020, in the middle of the Covid-19 lockdown. In one of the cases IPB News reported at the time, a man from East Midnapore had allegedly offered ₹50,000 to the father of a girl in Basanti, a daily-wage labourer who had been out of work for days. Her friends found out, told the police, and officers reached the house with Childline volunteers on 7 June, just before the wedding was due to begin.
Child marriage in West Bengal is not a pandemic-era story. The state has one of the highest rates in India, and the Sundarbans show why it keeps coming back: every cyclone, flood and lost harvest makes a daughter’s marriage look, to a family with nothing left, like one fewer mouth to feed.
What the numbers say
According to the fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21), about 42% of women in West Bengal aged 20 to 24 were married before they turned 18, UNFPA India notes. The national figure is 23.3%. While India’s rate fell from 26.8% in the previous survey (2015–16), West Bengal’s stayed at about the same level, according to an analysis by Ashoka University’s Centre for Economic Data and Analysis. In rural Bengal the figure is about 48%, writes Pintu Paul of the Indian Social Institute, New Delhi.
Very few of these marriages reach a police station. The National Crime Records Bureau counted 6,038 cases under the Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, across India in 2023, and 5,267 of them were in Assam, Onmanorama reported. West Bengal, with roughly four in ten young women married as children, registered 118. Across the 10 years from 2011 to 2020, the state recorded 514 cases in all, according to Factly’s reading of NCRB data.
Why the Sundarbans are different
About 4.5 million people live on the Indian side of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest delta, Al Jazeera reported. South 24 Parganas has faced more cyclones than any other district in the country, according to the India Meteorological Department, and 37.2% of its people live below the poverty line, according to state data cited by Down To Earth.
“Every time a cyclone hits, embankments collapse and farm lands get inundated by saline water,” Nihar Ranjan Raptan, founder-secretary of the NGO Goranbose Gram Bikash Kendra (GGBK), told Down To Earth. Child labour, child marriage and trafficking rise after each disaster, he said. Speaking to Al Jazeera in 2021, he put a number on it: his organisation was seeing eight to 10 cases a month after the pandemic began, up from four or five.
Laboni Singha Das, a Childline worker on Sagar Island, told Al Jazeera she had rescued close to 50 girls in under a year, and linked the rise to schools staying shut. “The most vulnerable are those aged between 13-16 years,” she said.
The people living it
Al Jazeera told the story of a 17-year-old from the area who had been preparing for her board exams in April 2020. Within a year she had been married, had left school, and had come back to her parents’ home, leaving the family with a debt of ₹80,000. Her father’s tailoring income had fallen to almost nothing in the lockdown. “We thought by marrying off our daughter, we would have one person less to feed,” her mother told the channel.
Workers on the ground describe a pattern. Prospective grooms often ask for no dowry, which on its own is a strong pull for a poor family. “They think that way, her daughter will at least have a roof over her head and food on her plate,” Shaswati Mallick, a programme coordinator at GGBK, told Down To Earth. She added that some of these men are traffickers posing as suitors, and that girls are often forced into sex work after the “marriage”.
Down To Earth’s 2022 report traced one such route: four young women from Sundarbans villages, two of them minors, were lured to Delhi with promises of domestic work at ₹10,000 a month and sold for between ₹4 lakh and ₹5 lakh each. Police rescued all four in October 2021.
What the authorities say and do
In June 2020 the West Bengal Commission for Protection of Child Rights set up a special team with NGOs to tackle child marriage in the Sundarbans, Al Jazeera reported. Girls rescued from child marriages are sent to rehabilitation centres for at least 40 days for counselling, vocational training and, where needed, a return to school. Under the 2006 Act, anyone who performs or helps arrange a child marriage can be jailed for up to two years and fined up to ₹1 lakh.
The law has a gap that frontline workers know well. When a wedding is stopped before it happens, the would-be groom is usually let off with a warning or a written undertaking. “The law does not allow us to book a person if the marriage has not taken place,” an officer at the Canning women’s police station told The Telegraph in 2020.
The state’s main answer has been to pay girls to stay in school. Kanyashree Prakalpa, launched in 2013, gives unmarried girls aged 13 to 18 who are in school ₹1,000 a year and a one-time grant of ₹25,000 at 18 if they are still unmarried and studying or working. More than 60 lakh girls have enrolled, and the scheme won the United Nations Public Service Award in 2017. Paul writes that the scheme “has demonstrated potential” but needs stronger targeting in the high-risk districts where child marriage persists.
Ananya Chakraborti, chairperson of the state child rights commission, told Down To Earth that after a disaster, trafficking gets little attention because rescue and relief come first. “Looking at trafficking is an afterthought,” she said.
The wider picture
Some experts warn against blaming one cyclone or one lockdown. Anurag Danda of the Observer Research Foundation told Al Jazeera that land loss, saline water and shrinking landholdings drive the poverty behind child marriage and trafficking. Zaki Wahhaj of the University of Kent, who has studied the Bangladesh side of the delta, said these patterns “suggest that climate change may be worsening the problem of child marriage in the Sundarbans region”.
Data on how many girls go missing from India’s population over a lifetime tells a related story. IPB looks at it in India’s missing women.
What would change it
The Sundarbans already have most of the pieces: Childline workers, village child protection committees, a state scholarship and a law. What the reporting points to is timing and follow-through. Schools need to reopen quickly after every disaster, because a girl out of school is the easiest to marry off. Relief after a cyclone needs to include child-protection checks, not just food and tarpaulin. Stopped weddings need follow-up visits, since a family that was stopped once may try again. And cases need to be registered, so that the numbers stop hiding the problem.
Those decisions sit with the state’s Women and Child Development department, district child protection units and the police. In 2020, the Basanti wedding was stopped because a girl’s friends spoke up. The system should not depend on that happening every time.
If you know of a child marriage being planned, call the Childline helpline on 1098 (free, 24 hours) or the police on 112.
More stories beneath the headline in Third Eye. For daily news, follow IPB News.
Sources: The Telegraph (via AHA Foundation), June 2020 · IPB News, 14 June 2020 · UNFPA India, July 2022 · CEDA, Ashoka University · Policy Circle, December 2025 · Onmanorama, 3 October 2025 · Factly · Al Jazeera, 14 April 2021 · Down To Earth, 21 June 2022 · Kanyashree Prakalpa
