West Bengal orders show-cause notices after 60,000 underage hospital births

West Bengal will send show-cause notices to husbands recorded against institutional deliveries by girls under 18, chief minister Suvendu Adhikari said on 7 September at Nabanna. The state health department counted nearly 60,000 such births from 1 January to 30 June 2026. Some briefings used a higher figure near 67,000 when teenage pregnancy and delivery counts were combined. Adhikari said West Bengal now stands first in the country on marriage of girls below 18 and on childbirth before 18.

Murshidabad recorded 12,847 institutional births to underage girls in that half-year. South 24 Parganas recorded 4,178. Adhikari said a large share of cases involved mothers aged 15 to 18, and that births to girls aged 10 to 13 had also been logged, especially in Murshidabad. One briefing attributed more than 53 percent of pregnancies in the 15-17 group to Muslim households. The health department figures come from hospital records, not from a fresh household survey.

The legal path he described is already on the books. The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006 treats a girl under 18 and a boy under 21 as children for marriage. The Act allows up to two years in prison and a fine of Rs 1 lakh. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 makes sexual contact with a minor a cognisable, non-bailable offence, with terms that can run from 10 to 20 years depending on the charge. Adhikari said the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita would also be used. Priests and qazis who solemnise underage marriages, and family members on both sides, would face arrest.

Husbands named in the hospital lists have one month to produce a birth certificate or other proof that the mother was 18 or older at the time of marriage or delivery. If they fail, Adhikari said the director general of police, who sat beside him at the briefing, would register cases. The state will stop Central and state welfare payments to those families. Police are to run house-to-house drives.

The scale is the problem the speech did not solve. Adhikari said there were not enough jails for everyone who would be guilty if the law were applied to the full list. A six-month hospital count of 60,000 births implies a much larger set of marriages, many of them already years old. Retrospective POCSO cases against husbands of now-adult women who delivered as minors will meet courts that have seen this collision before: a welfare state that recorded the birth, a family that treated the marriage as settled, and a statute that does not lapse because a child has since turned 18.

Enforcement will also be uneven by district. Murshidabad's 12,847 cases are more than three times South 24 Parganas and will absorb the first wave of notices. Rural registrars, qazis and priests are the named targets. The health department list gives the state a paper trail it did not have when child-marriage drives depended on police raids at wedding venues. It also gives defence lawyers a record of state hospitals that admitted the mothers, delivered the babies and sent them home.

Adhikari blamed the previous government for the ranking. The notices, the one-month clock and the welfare cut are the new government's tools. Whether the 60,000 figure falls in the next half-year will be the measure. Arrest totals and dropped cases will be the other measure. Both will be visible before the next health-department extract is read out at Nabanna.