Decorated with marigolds and ribbons, 108 toilets have been opened in the Indian village where two schoolgirls were found hanging from a tree in May.

The girls are thought to have gone out into the fields after dark because their home, like most in their district, lacked a toilet.

The toilets were donated on Sunday to the village of Katra Shahadatganj in northern Uttar Pradesh state, where women had long been forced to trek into the fields at night to relieve themselves.

“I believe no woman must lose her life just because she has to go out to defecate,” said Bindeshwar Pathak, founder of the sanitation charity Sulabh, which built the toilets.

“Our aim is to provide a toilet to every household in the country in the not too distant future,” Pathak told AFP in Katra.

Police are still investigating the deaths and suspected gang rape of the girls, cousins aged 12 and 14, but no one has been charged and five men initially accused are set to be released.



The incident sparked uproar, but the circumstances which led the schoolgirls to trek outside at night are not unusual in India.

Unicef estimates that almost 594 million people, nearly 50% of India’s population, defecate in the open, with the situation acute in poor rural areas.

Some 300 million women and girls are forced to defecate outside, exposed not only to the risks of disease and bacterial infection, but also harassment and assault by men.

The prime minister, Narendra Modi, raised the often taboo subject during his Independence Day speech in August, saying India should strive to ensure every household had a toilet within the next four years.

“We are in the 21st century and yet there is still no dignity for women as they have to go out in the open to defecate. Can you imagine the number of problems they have to face because of this?” Modi asked.

Mother-of-three Dhanwati Devi, one of the villagers to receive a new toilet, said she could finally relieve herself without fear of being attacked in the dark.



“I used to dream my house will have a toilet one day. Now that I have one, I feel so proud and liberated,” the 48-year-old said, standing next to the blue and pink painted cubicle adorned with strings of flowers outside her home.

“I used to be so scared when going out in the deserted fields in the dark, because I could be attacked any time by depraved criminals,” she said.

The uncle of the girls who were hanged said that for his family, the village’s new toilets were symbols of both “hope and despair”.

“Each time we see the toilets, we are reminded that our girls died because we didn’t have one earlier,” said the uncle, who cannot be named for legal reasons.

“But it also gives hope that our women will be safer now because they no longer have to venture out in darkness.”