India grapples with its child marriage challenge.

On a July afternoon in Upparapalli village in the state of Andhra Pradesh, southern India, something remarkable was happening. Inside a classroom, a group of teenage school girls trilled a lilting melody in honour of 15-year-old Savitri Pullakunta, whose marriage had been successfully thwarted by their collective eff ort. The young girls who had gathered in this school in the Adoni division of Andhra’s Kurnool district were members of a girls’ collective. Such collectives are part of a strategy by UN, governmental, and non-governmental agencies to boost the confi dence of teenage girls and to fi ght child marriage—a practice that continues across the country, particularly in rural backwaters, despite a legal ban. Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh, is a bustling information technology hub. But child marriage persists amid abject poverty—one of the many challenges facing a country focused on stellar economic growth. According to the most recent National Family Health Survey, there has been an overall decline in the percentage of women aged 20–24 years who were married before the legal age of 18 years—from 54·2% in 1992–93 to 44·5% in 2005–06. But that still makes for an unacceptably large number of child brides in rural and semi-urban areas where most Indians still live. The underlying reasons are a mix of poverty, lack of education, social pressure, and, above all, low status of women. Child marriage robs girls of education, their health, their future, and some times their lives. It is also one of the biggest barriers to achieving the UN Millennium Development Goals. And yet, disturbingly enough, it remains on the margins of mainstream debates on development. However, there are some promising signs of change. In 2011, some of the world’s most eminent senior citizens came together to draw attention to child marriage. The Girls, Not Brides campaign, launched by The Elders, an organisation of renowned global leaders, is seeking to end child marriage within a generation. The campaign, announced at the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in September, is backed by people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Mary Robinson, GraÇa Machel, and Ela Bhatt, founder of India’s Self Employed Women’s Association.