NEW DELHI: In a development that has positive implications for women’s health, the Sample Registration System survey 2017 has put the all-India percentage of women married at less than 18 years of age at 2.3%, way below the 2011 census figure of 3.7%. In rural areas, this percentage is down to 2.6% from 4.4% recorded during 2011 census. The percentage of women in urban areas who married short of adulthood however remains unchanged at 1.7%.As per the latest SRS survey to be released, the national mean age at effective marriage for females in the year 2017 was 22.1 years and varied from 21.7 years in rural areas to 23.1 years in urban areas. Census 2011 had returned the mean age of marriage of women at 21.2 years.Talking of individual states, the mean average age of women at the time of marriage in West Bengal was 21.2 years, while in J&K it was 25.1 years in 2017.The SRS survey found that 63.7% of India’s women got married at more than 21 years of age, a figure that census 2011 returned as 52.2%. What’s more, the percentage of women in rural India who were beyond 21 years of age at the time of marriage was recorded at 59.2% in SRS 2017, up from 46.1% during census 2011. In urban areas, percentage of women aged over 21 at effective marriage grew to 73.6% in SRS 2017 from 68.7% recorded in the last decennial exercise.Sample Registration Survey in India is the largest demographic survey in the world covering around 7.9 million population.Around 33.9% women across India — 38.2% in rural India and 24.7% in urban India — got married between 18 and 20 years of age, as per SRS survey report 2017. The corresponding all-India figure for 2011 census was 44.2%, with rural and urban percentages at 49.5% and 29.6% respectively.Among the states, Jharkhand recorded an all-India high of 4.2% women who were non-adults at the time of marriage in SRS 2017, followed by West Bengal at 3.6%, Rajasthan at 3.5% and Bihar at 3.3%. In 2011 census, 7.8% women in West Bengal were below 18 years of age at the time of marriage, followed by 6.1% in Jharkhand and 5.1% in Assam. Interestingly, Assam in SRS survey 2017 returned only 2.2% of its women at below 18 years at the time of marriage.Significantly, the percentage of females in rural West Bengal who were not adults at the time of marriage fell to 3.9% in 2017 from a high of 9.9% reported by census 2011.The state with the lowest percentage of sub-adult women at effective marriage, as per SRS 2017, was Delhi (0.4%), followed by Kerala (1.3%). In census 2011, Jammu & Kashmir and Haryana had recorded the lowest proportion of women who were not yet 18 at the time of marriage, at 0.3%.