In India, a divorce over a toilet was granted Friday after a wife complained that her husband refuse to build a bathroom at their home, forcing her to defecate in public.
A family court in Bhilwara, in the northern Indian state of Rajasthan, ruled in favor of the woman after she filed for divorce two years ago, The Times of India reported. The woman said after she married in 2011, her husband ignored numerous requests for the toilet, which the court ruled amounted to "cruelty."
"We spend money on buying tobacco, liquor, and mobile phones, but are unwilling to construct toilets to protect the dignity of our family," the court said in its ruling, stated The Times of India. "In villages, women have to wait until sunset to answer nature's call. This is not only physical cruelty but also outraging the modesty of a woman."
The husband countered by saying that his wife's family never raised the issue of toilet access in the home at the time of marriage, according to the Times. He told the court that since most women in the village defecate openly, he found his wife's demand for a private toilet unusual.
Rajesh Sharma, the woman's attorney, told Agence France-Presse that the judge called open defecation disgraceful and deemed it torture to deny women a safe environment for relief.
A World Health Organization (WHO) report said that more than half a billion people in India still "continue to defecate in gutters, behind bushes, or in open water bodies, with no dignity or privacy," the BBC stated in 2014.
The Daily Mail reported that some 70 percent of Indian households do not have toilets, but 90 percent have access to cellphones. Indian officials said open defecation is caused not only by poverty, but the belief that home toilets are not clean.
India Prime Minister Narendra Modi promised to build a toilet in every home by 2019 to end open defecation in the country, and the government claims that it has built 20 million toilets since 2014.
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