The requirements for obtaining a marriage license in the state of New York are rather boring. Each person has to be at least eighteen years old or have parental consent (and in no case will the state issue a marriage license to someone under the age of fourteen). Certain close relatives can’t marry, and people who are currently married to other people are similarly ineligible to marry someone else. You have to fork over $40. But it’s pretty straightforward, as you’d expect. By requiring that the grooms first send in a picture of their commode before issuing a marriage license, the government is incentivizing the start of a cultural change via infrastructure improvements.
But to participate in a particular marriage ceremony in the Madhya Pradesh, a state in India, you need to prove something else. The groom needs to show that his domicile comes with a toilet.
Really.
In early 2013, Madhya Pradesh officials conducted a mass marriage ceremony to provide a way for women from poor families to wed their would-be grooms. It’s a program that has been around since 2006 or 2007. The recent ceremony attracted just under 200 couples to the proverbial (but in this case, nonexistent) altar, and the program has seen nearly 2,000 poor couples enter into marriage this way in about a year’s time. And the state is using it as an opportunity to fix another problem.
According to the World Toilet Organization—yes, there’s a World Toilet Organization (and it’s actually a pretty serious charity)—there are about 2.5 billion people without access to a functioning private toilet. Most of them live in developing regions and are very poor, and the fledgling families in Madhya Pradesh are no exception. A recent survey suggests that half of all Indian households lack a toilet, which is a major public health issue. As Fast Company points out, improperly disposed-of fecal matter is the largest killer of children across the world, claiming over 1.4 million young lives a year. According to a 2007 report by Bloomberg, India accumulates as much as 100,000 tons of human excrement in fields each day.
So far, we don’t know whether the toilets-for-marriage-licenses program will have an effect on the problem. But the problem is significant enough to warrant this otherwise absurd-sounding requirement.
Ghana is looking at another way of dealing with the same problem, but their solution doesn’t involve marriage. It involves recycling. According to GOOD, “fecal sludge” (their words) may be able to be used as an industrial fuel—basically, a (rather gross) biodiesel. The theory is, if that happens, markets will form to purchase the sludge before it becomes an everyday pollutant, thereby creating the financial incentive necessary to prevent haphazard dumping of latrines. The initiative has serious support behind it—it is backed by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.