Bardiya, Nepal – Bali, unlike most girls around her, never liked to sing and dance. She loved cars and dreamed of how it would feel to wrap her fingers around the wheel and leave her village behind in the rearview mirror.

But her dream was cut short on her sixth birthday when she was sold into servitude by her parents.

For five years, she scrubbed dishes, cleaned floors and worked the fields for a family from a higher caste than her own. The caste system, prevalent across South Asia, is a centuries-old social hierarchy that continues to shape society: People from aastes at the lower rung of the ladder often continue to face entrenched discrimination, despite modern laws against bias.

In return, Bali’s parents were allowed to rent a patch of land in Bardiya district, 540km (336 miles) west of the capital Kathmandu, where they could grow and sell their own produce, splitting profits 50-50 with their landlord.

At 13, Bali was married to a man, an electrician, six years older than her. She was pregnant with her only daughter one year later.

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Outside her one-room home in Bardiya, Bali, now 32, told Al Jazeera that her biggest wish was for her 17-year daughter to stay in school.

“I cannot watch her get trapped in an early marriage like I did,” she said.

Bali’s daughter is among millions of adolescent girls in Nepal who women’s rights activists fear could be at an increased risk of harm if a new law being discussed by the government to reduce the legal marriage age from 20 to 18 is passed.

In support of its goal to end child marriage by 2030, the Nepalese government officially raised the minimum age for marriage from 18 to 20 in 2017. Though Nepalese citizens can vote at the age of 18, the idea behind raising the marriage age to 20 was to ensure that young women complete school and can make relatively more informed choices. For the first time, those found violating the law could face up to three years in prison and fines of up to 10,000 Nepalese rupees ($73).

In a country where legal enforcement is weak, the aim behind increasing the minimum age for marriage was to also send a broader signal to a conservative society — that women in partocular benefit if they aren’t pushed into early marriage.

However, on January 15, 2025, in a move sparking national debate, a parliamentary sub-committee within the House of Representatives recommended lowering the legal age back to 18.

The recommendation concluded that based on “ground realities, we believe that lowering the marriage age to 18 will reduce legal complexities and reflect the social realities of rural Nepal”.

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Supporters of the law to lower the age argue it would stop innocent men from being imprisoned for marrying out of love. Others, including human rights groups, women advocacy collectives and teenage girls interviewed by Al Jazeera, say the recommendation is designed to protect men, rather than promote gender equality in Nepal.

Though illegal since 1963, child marriage has been practised widely for generations in Nepal, especially in rural communities where 78 percent of the Himalayan nation’s population lives. According to the United Nations children’s agency, UNICEF, there are more than 5 million child brides in Nepal, where 37 percent of women under the age of 30 are married before their 18th birthday.

Around the world, the causes of child marriage are multifaceted. In South Asia – the region with the highest number of child brides – it remains deeply embedded in traditional customs and social norms.

While the prevalence of child marriage in Nepal has fallen over the past decade, the slide has been much slower (7 percent) than in the region of South Asia (15 percent) as a whole, according to the Child Marriage Data Portal, an initiative backed by the governments of Belgium, Canada, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States, and the European Union. Nonprofits and campaigners say their efforts to eliminate child marriage in Nepal have been thwarted by economic and social problems specific to the country.

A generation of suffering began in 1996, when the 10-year-long Nepalese civil war fractured communities across the country. An earthquake in 2015 killed almost 9,000 people — most of them in Nepal — and made hundreds of thousands homeless. Six months later, a blockade from India put 3 million Nepalese children under the age of 5 at risk of death due to a shortage of fuel, food and medicine. The COVID-19 pandemic affected nearly 1 million jobs in tourism in Nepal, which derives 6.7 percent of its gross domestic product (GDP) from the industry.

Lifeline for young girls

Child marriage in Nepal typically sees girls hand over complete control of their future to the family of their husband. It often cuts off education and employment, and increases the likelihood of physical and psychological abuse.

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Bali is reminded of one of the most painful effects of being married so young every time she looks at her daughter.

When Bali gave birth, her “daughter was yellow and weighed just 4 pounds [1.8kg],” she told Al Jazeera. “I found out later that my body wasn’t producing enough haemoglobin when I was pregnant. Like me, my daughter tires very easily now and needs daily medication.”

Mina Kumari Parajuli, the regional manager of Plan International, an NGO that has been working on child rights in Nepal since 1978, said child brides are “at a much higher risk” of getting pregnant at an early age, which can lead to complications like malnutrition, anaemia and higher rates of maternal and infant deaths.

One afternoon in 2021, a vocational training programme offered by Plan International caught Bali’s attention. If selected, she would be given driving lessons. After passing her test, she would progress to training for driving and operating heavy-goods vehicles (HGVs).

“I was nervous but excited because I knew I could do it,” she told Al Jazeera.

It took 45 days for her HGV licence to arrive. Bali was ecstatic. At the hauling company she now works at, which helps fund her daughter’s medication, she transports tonnes of boulders for construction every day.

“I am the only woman who has ever worked as a driver at the company, and I’m so proud of it. I get to drive for a living now!”

Suffering in silence

Other women, like 18-year-old Khima, who lives close to the Indian border in Bardiya with her 36-year-old mother, still suffer in silence.

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“Every morning, she was always dressed and ready to go to school far before her brothers,” recalled Khima’s mother with tears in her eyes. “She really enjoyed learning.”

Dressed in a bright, orange fleece jacket, decorated with paw prints, Khima’s hands are clasped in front of her. Her gaze is still as she describes watching her father, often drunk, beating her mother, who was forced to marry him when she had been 14.

In January this year, at the request of her mother, Khima, then 17, married a man she had met just once before. He is 27. “I thought she would have a better chance in life if she married,” said her mother. “So I told Khima to do it.”

Khima said she wants to finish her education but does not know if her “husband’s family will allow it”.

Khima’s marriage, like many others from the most disadvantaged families, was negotiated by her relatives. It means one less mouth to feed for the girl’s family, and often, an extra pair of hands to work and contribute to the household for her new in-laws.

Parajuli, whose NGO offers support and tailored care to victims of child marriage, said it was challenging to reach “girls [who are married early] as they increasingly socially isolated from their peers”.

Like 22-year-old Anjali. She was 14 when she entered into a “love marriage” – a term used across South Asia to define marriages not arranged by the couple’s families. Anjali married her husband in secret because he was from a higher caste.

Being a Dalit – the community at the bottom of the complex Hindu caste hierarchy – meant Anjali was effectively imprisoned by her in-laws for five years after her marriage. Anjali was forced to work on their fields and forbidden to meet friends or go back to school.

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So strong was the caste prejudice against her that despite living on her husband’s family’s grounds, both she and her daughter were not allowed to enter their family home. “They made me and their own granddaughter sleep in a hut in the field for five years,” she said.

During monsoon season, she recalled “how water gushed through the roofless shelter, often causing her to shiver and shake until morning”.

Since their marriage, her husband has worked abroad in India and rarely visits. Bound to servitude for her in-laws and without access to education or employment, Anjali was desperate.

Last year, she took a loan of 50,000 rupees ($362) from a local women’s collective to build a small stone house with two rooms, “close enough” to her in-laws for them to deem it acceptable. There is no access to running water and a broken hole covered by a fading newspaper is her only window.

“This house is my palace,” Anjali told Al Jazeera. “After not seeing my husband for two years, and enduring everything myself, I have peace here.”

A new generation with hope

In some rural regions of Nepal, there are indicators that young girls and boys are striving for change.

Together with Plan International, a grassroots organisation called Banke Unesco (unrelated to the UN’s UNESCO) has been training local authorities, law enforcement officials, religious leaders, schools and youth groups to identify and prevent child marriages, as well as supporting at-risk girls and adolescents.

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Mahesh Nepali, the project lead in Bardiya, told Al Jazeera, that since 2015, the rates of child marriage have dropped from as high as 58 percent to 22 percent in many districts in the region.

On the potential law change, Nepali said reducing the legal marriage age by two years would be “wrong”.

“It would undermine all the work we have been doing to raise awareness about how dangerous young marriage is,” he said.

Swostika, 17, is a member of Champions of Change, a campaign group initiated by Plan International in 41 countries to combat gender-based violence and abuse in marginalised and often hard-to-access communities.

Despite facing threats that the members of the group would be beaten or kidnapped for their advocacy, Swostika and her team remain defiant. During the COVID-19 pandemic, she initiated a social media campaign, inviting hundreds of young girls to an online group where each was asked to sign a declaration against the practice.

[Above, is “the practice” the practice of child marriage or gender-based violence and abuse in marginalised and often hard-to-access communities?]

The “network grew and grew” during the lockdown, she says, and now they meet every Saturday for two hours to discuss if “anybody [has] been affected and what needs to be done to help eliminate it [child marriage] completely”.

“At first, even my parents told me to stop campaigning, because they were worried for my safety,” Swostika told Al Jazeera.

But she would not listen.

“Real change is happening,” she said. “I believe the next generation of girls and boys won’t have the same problems we faced. We just need to carry on fighting.”

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Family names of victims and their relatives have been removed to protect their privacy.