Indian Woman Divorces Husband over His Refusal to Build Toilet | See Details

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An Indian court has granted a woman permission to divorce her husband after he consistently refused to build a toilet in their home, forcing her to relieve herself in the open.

Family court judge Rajendra Kumar Sharma in India’s western Rajasthan state ruled on 18 August that a toilet was a necessity in every home and defecating in the open was ‘disgraceful’ for society and ‘torture’ for women.

Sangeeta Mali, 23, told the court in Bhilwara district that her husband, Chotu Lal Mali, had agreed to build her a toilet when they married in 2011, but never did. Mali told the judge that she was ashamed of having to defecate in the fields around her home in Pur village with no privacy or comfort.

“He kept saying he would build it but it was just talk. In the end, he refused point blank. My in-laws also refused. Every day was agony – waiting for it to get dark so that there was no one around who could see me, forcing me to hold on even though my bladder was bursting. I couldn’t live with the stress any more,” she told the Guardian.

Mali is not the first woman to take action over sanitation concerns. In March, a bride in Telangana state, in southern India, refused to go ahead with her marriage until her fiance had built a toilet. And in April last year, a bride in Kanpur called off her wedding at the last minute for the same reason.

Debates about sanitation have reached the big screen, with Mali’s case echoing the storyline of a just-released Bollywood film called Toilet: A Love Story. The film has a woman threatening to leave her husband unless he builds a toilet. To win back her love and respect, he embarks on a campaign to change his village’s lackadaisical policy on latrines.

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Of the estimated 2.3 billion people in the world who do not have access to toilets, more than one-third live in India.

PHOTO CREDIT: Photograph: Harish Tyagi/EPA