New Delhi: Even though it may have indicated a decline in early marriage, data released as part of the National Family Health Survey-6 (2023-24) showed that 20.1% of women in the 20-24 age group surveyed were married before the age of 18, which is the legal age of marriage for women. This marks a decline of more than three percentage points compared to NFHS-5 (2019-21), when it was 23.3%.For men – aged 25–29 – 15.9% had married before the legal age of marriage was 21.This represents a decline of 17.7% from the 2019-21 survey.On gender-based violence, the report said the percentage of married women aged 18-49 who experienced marital violence declined from 29.2% in 2019-21 to 22.3% in 2023-24. However, a much higher percentage of rural women (24.4%) experienced spousal violence compared to 17.5% urban women. In 2019-21, this figure was 24.2% for urban and 31.6% for rural.Meanwhile, the prevalence of early marriage, now at 20%, has seen a decline over the NFHS round – it was 26.8% in 2015-16 (NFHS-4) and 47.4% in 2005-06 (NFHS-3).The 2023-2024 survey showed a wide gap in terms of percentage of early marriage between women in rural and urban India – 23.3% for rural and 11.4% for urban. In the 2019-21 survey, it was 27% for rural India and 14.7% for urban India. The difference – rural and urban – was also apparent for men.While 19% of men in rural India were married before the age of 21, the figure was 9.7% in urban India.In 2019-21, it was 11.3% for men in urban areas and 21.1% in rural areas.The report also focused on the percentage of women aged 15–19 who were already mothers or pregnant at the time of the survey. This was about the same as the previous survey’s 6.7%. In terms of gender-based sexual violence, the data showed that women aged 19-29 who had experienced such violence by the age of 18 were 0.7% of those surveyed, and this was down from 1.2% in 2019-21.