The word, awareness, is unimaginably useful. It has no particular content, and can be employed to mean anything that suits anyone in any context; it suggests no time frame, and therefore imposes no embarrassing limits for effective action; it has an impressive psychological resonance, and so is in itself a readymade excuse for proving elusive. Biswanath Chowdhury, the West Bengal minister for women, child development and social welfare, must have found that the word did him yeoman service in defence against the findings of the National Family Health Survey – 3. The report showed that 37 per cent of the women who had married between 1996 and 2001 had been minors when they married. The findings are of the period 2005-6, and place West Bengal seventh in underage marriages, for a staggering 53.9 per cent of women in the state marry before they are 18. So seven per cent of girls become pregnant before they are 15, and 49.3 per cent are mothers before they are 19. Registered cases against child marriages numbered eight in 2006.

In this context, the minister’s invoking of awareness to change the tendency towards minor marriage in a recent seminar becomes quite piquant. For one, the findings, which include percentages of sexual violence — three times higher than the national average, and domestic violence — West Bengal ranks among the highest — make nonsense of the state government’s claims for the improvement of women’s lot. Second, it raises the question of time. How long does it take a government to make its people ‘aware’ — more than 30 years? Or is it that the government itself is not aware — or not bothered?

But the most important question is about the content of the awareness. What is it that the people must be aware of? It may surprise Mr Chowdhury, but a large number of people know that 18 is the legal age of marriage. They are not unaware. But what they are also aware of, especially in the villages, is that they often have to leave growing girls at home and go to work, because schools are either too far off, or are too much to pay for. Besides, the older the girl, the higher the dowry. A girl married off is no longer the parents’ responsibility: she can be fed and sheltered, or exploited and beaten up, as the husband and in-laws please.

This represents a whole complex of issues that have to do with poverty, the inability to go to school, a lack of security at home and outside it, the complete absence of the use of law — not just against minor marriage but also against dowry and violence. Awareness makes no difference. Perhaps the government and its spokespersons need to come out from behind comfy screens of meaningless words and actually do something to change the situation. They have a problem about awareness, not the people of the state.