No toilet no bride? Intrahousehold bargaining in male-skewed marriage markets in India

Haryana state in India is characterized by widespread discrimination against women, including a severe population-level sex imbalance. In this context an innovative social marketing campaign, which targeted pro-sanitation messages to households active in local marriage markets, was implemented with the goal of increasing toilet ownership. This paper estimates the impact of this program, known colloquially as “No Toilet No Bride”, on household-level latrine ownership. Private sanitation coverage in Haryana increased by 21% specifically among households with boys active on the marriage market. This effect is larger and concentrated in marriage markets where women are relatively scarce and absent when women are relatively abundant, which together suggest the program operated by successfully linking sanitation outcomes with marriage market competition induced by local scarcities of women due to male-biased sex ratios.