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There has been a significant drop in the number of child marriages worldwide and India contributed significantly to the global decline in the practice, the UN children's agency Unicef said on Tuesday. According to the Unicef, 25 million child marriages were prevented in the past decade. South Asia witnessed the largest decline in child marriage worldwide in the last 10 years as a girl's risk of marrying before turning 18 dropped by more than a third, from nearly 50 per cent to 30 per cent, in large part due to progress in India.