The day after her wedding, Komal Hadala was shaken awake at 4am by her mother-in-law. They joined a group of women who were waiting outside the house, in Nithora village, Uttar Pradesh.

“It was the time when they went outdoors to relieve themselves in the fields before men started appearing. I couldn’t believe it. It was total darkness outside. And it had been raining,” says Hadala.

They walked over 1km to find a suitable spot but the rain had made the ground and the undergrowth squelchy and disgusting, she says. “There were insects because of the rain and I was petrified. What was worse was the dark. At that hour you couldn’t see a thing and it was so disorientating.”

Hadala, 22, had spent her childhood in a house in the Indian capital that had a toilet. This new fact of life in her married home was a rude awakening. It wasn’t long before she began pestering her husband and in-laws to build a toilet. They agreed. But one year later, by last summer, Hadala had succeeded in persuading 250 other families to build one too, giving Nithora the distinction of being “open defecation-free”, as it is known in India.

Hadala tells the story of her toilet revolution sitting in her home with the women who supported her mission – her husband’s mother, grandmother and sister. The house is solid, though cold and oddly designed, and it is strange to think that, when building it, no one in the family, not even the women, thought of installing a toilet.

“We never knew anything else. This is how it has always been. We had no choice but to go out in the fields. It was hell – getting up so early, the freezing cold in the winters, the fog, the fear that some man will stumble across you. The worst was – oh my god – when I used to have a bad stomach,” says Athri, her grandmother-in-law.

Sometimes men would suddenly appear and start jeering. At other times, a farmer would turn up armed with a stick to run them off his fields. At night, women had to wait for cover of darkness before venturing out. For pregnant women, the sick and the elderly, with arthritic joints and mobility issues, answering nature’s call was an ordeal.

After Hadala had expressed her intense shame to her in-laws, the family approached the village council head, Chahat Ram, to ask if funds were available. Ram acted swiftly to access the funds available for building toilets under the government’s Clean India campaign to end open defecation.

Prime minister Narendra Modi had famously told Indians once to build toilets first, temples later. His goal is to have a toilet in every home. More than 90 million toilets have been built since 2014 when he came to power.

Komal Hadala (left) with her grandmother, mother-in-law and sister-in-law. Photograph: Amrit Dhillon

But persuading villagers to change their centuries-old habits is not easy. Surveys have shown that in some areas, more than half the people still defecate in the open. “I had to keep meeting families to din it into them that going outside led to diarrhoea, cholera, typhoid and other illnesses,” says Hadala. “They didn’t think there was any link between illness and going outdoors but I learned all this at school. Luckily school children were receptive and they took the message home.”

With funds coming in fast, building 250 toilets was not difficult. Persuading villagers to use them was another matter. Some of the families with existing toilets had been using them for storage and continued going outdoors.

The reasons were the same as those found in many villages where toilets have been built but remain unused. A toilet inside a home defiles its “purity”, goes a popular belief. You can’t have a toilet near a kitchen where you cook or near the puja (prayer) room. Moreover, going al fresco is better, say the elderly, because you get some exercise too.

Hadala got together with a bunch of women who, armed with torches and whistles, patrolled the fields to warn off the recidivists, mostly male. “The men seemed to think the toilets had been built only for women, not for them,” says Satto, Hadala’s mother-in-law.

It was not the embarrassment of having a spotlight shone on your naked bottom accompanied by a screeching whistle, nor the hygiene or dignity argument that won most of the men over. It was the issue of women’s safety that convinced them. They realised that being out in the dark at 4am or 9pm was dangerous for the women in the family.

“Now, I can say with pride that no one in the villages defecates in the open. The whole atmosphere has been changed by [Hadala’s] efforts and everyone is keeping every bit of the village clean,” says Ram.

The village school, for example, has a row of neat and clean separate toilets for boys and girls – a far cry from many village schools where there is often no toilet at all – a running water supply and several places for handwashing. The girls get free sanitary pads.

“It took a young girl to get us to raise our standards. But now everyone is involved and we plan to keep it up,” says Ram.