West Bengal records nearly 60,000 underage hospital births in six months

West Bengal recorded nearly 60,000 institutional deliveries involving girls under 18 between 1 January and 30 June 2026. Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari released the Health Department count at Nabanna on 7 September and said the state now stands first in the country on two linked measures: marriage of girls before 18, and childbirth before 18.

Murshidabad recorded 12,847 of those hospital births. South 24 Parganas recorded 4,178. Adhikari said cases involving mothers between 10 and 13 years had also been logged in Murshidabad. He told reporters the numbers were so high that the existing jail capacity would not hold every person who could be charged if the law were applied to every file.

The figures come from institutional records, not household surveys. That is the point of the briefing. A hospital birth certificate names a mother, a date and an age. The state can send a notice to a named husband and demand documents. Adhikari said the Health Department will issue show-cause notices requiring proof, within one month, that both partners were adults under Indian law at the time of the marriage. If the papers do not arrive, the Director General of Police, who sat beside the chief minister at the briefing, is to register cases.

Two statutes sit on the table. The Prohibition of Child Marriage Act, 2006, bars marriage with a person below 18 and allows imprisonment of up to two years and a fine of Rs 1 lakh. The Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012, treats sexual activity with a person below 18 as a criminal offence regardless of any ceremony. Adhikari also pointed to the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. He said priests and qazis who solemnise such marriages will be jailed, and that members of both families will not be spared.

The government will stop Central and State welfare payments to families found to have arranged or condoned an underage marriage that produced an underage birth. Door-to-door drives are to identify cases that never reached a hospital register. The combination is new in scale for this administration: a six-month hospital dataset, a one-month document window, a welfare cutoff and a public instruction to the police chief in the same room.

Adhikari blamed the previous government for the ranking. A Sample Registration Survey published in September 2025 put the share of females married before 18 in West Bengal at 6.3 percent against a national figure of 2.1 percent. National Family Health Survey-5 had already shown that 55.4 percent of women aged 20 to 24 in Murshidabad had married before 18. Those older survey numbers explain why Murshidabad leads the 2026 hospital list. They do not, by themselves, tell the state how many of this year's 60,000 births will produce a charge sheet.

The legal path is narrower than the speech. A hospital record of an underage mother is evidence of a birth. It is not, without more, proof of the date of a marriage or of who arranged it. Husbands will be asked for birth certificates and school or Aadhaar records. Families will contest ages. Priests and qazis will argue they were shown false papers. Courts will have to separate a public-health file from a criminal case. That is why the one-month notice period matters. It creates a paper trail before arrests begin.

West Bengal's position at the top of both national tables also changes the politics of welfare. Schemes that pay a family after a birth now sit next to a threat to stop those same schemes. District officers in Murshidabad and South 24 Parganas will be the first to test whether a cutoff can be applied without cutting support to the minor mother herself. The briefing did not spell out that distinction.

Polling for the Nandigram and Rejinagar assembly by-elections is due on 6 October. The Model Code of Conduct is already in force in East Midnapore and Murshidabad. A statewide drive that names husbands and clergy in those districts will run inside that code. The Election Commission has not spoken on the point. The Health Department letters will.

The open question is how many of the 60,000 files produce a conviction, and how many produce only a notice that expires. The hospital numbers are specific. The enforcement machinery now has thirty days to show whether it can match them.