Amid India elections, Harvard study aligns data with constituencies
The legal age for women to marry in India is 18, but a recent review of data showed that more than half of marriages in more than half of parliamentary constituencies — the equivalent of U.S. Congressional districts — involved an underage bride. Just one constituency out of 543 had no women marrying before 18. This observation, recently made by Indian journalist G.S. Mudur, drew on a trove of health, nutrition, and development data produced and made available recently by a team led by Professor of Population Health and Geography S.V. Subramanian and including Rockli Kim, a research associate at the Center for Population and Development Studies, and College senior Akshay Swaminathan. Subramanian said the effort was intended to remedy a little-recognized but nonetheless important problem: the mismatch between the geographical units across which data on key human welfare indicators are usually released and the geographical units for which elected representatives are responsible,...