BHOPAL, May 11: A woman social worker’s hands were chopped off by a man for counselling villagers in central India not to practise child marriage. The woman was attacked on Tuesday night in Rajgarh village of Dhar district, 200 kilometres from Madhya Pradesh capital Bhopal.

Shakuntla Verma, in her early 30s, had been going to nearby Bhavnagar village for the past four days and urging villagers not to marry off their children at mass child weddings due to take place there on Thursday.

“On Tuesday night when she was going to Bhavnagar, the brother of a would-be child bride attacked her with a sword and cut her hands. While one hand is totally severed, the other is badly injured. She has been rushed to a hospital in Indore city,” a police official said.

Police and administration officials rushed to the village and surrounded it but the man had fled, police said. Verma works in the state government’s department of women and child development.

Child marriages are rampant in most parts of northern India where due to abject poverty and archaic social norms, young girls and boys are married even before they reach puberty. —AFP