More girls in India are refusing to become child brides

By Mark Magnier
November 13, 2009

Reporting from Mohammad Nagar Dhani, India - Her fate was all but sealed, the wedding bells ringing in her relatives' heads. Then the bride-to-be, a little girl playing in the dirt in this impoverished village, plucked up her courage and said, "I do not."

Roshan Bairwa, then 14, joined a growing number of girls defying the centuries-old tradition of child marriage in a country where nearly half of all women are married before their 18th birthday.

The British Raj tried to stamp it out. Mohandas Gandhi, himself a child groom, campaigned against it. The United Nations has condemned it. And in 2006, the Indian government explicitly banned it. the rest