Indian, 80, has 90 wives but aiming for a century

An 80-year-old Indian man who lives in a remote village in the eastern state of Orissa says that he has married 90 times - and made his village proud in the process.

Udaynath Dakshiniray of Orali village says his marrying binge began in 1938 when he wed Sibapriya Dakshiniray. She happened to be more educated than her husband and wanted to leave the village to pursue better prospects in the capital, Bhubaneshwar.

But Mr Dakshiniray, a wealthy landowner with more than 160 hectares in the village, refused to go along with her because the idea of leaving his village to follow his wife was unthinkable as it was 'positively unmanly'.

When she refused to acquiesce and abandoned him, he vowed to have his revenge by marrying as many women as he could.

'The first few marriages were done in this spirit,' said Shubhra Patnaik, a social worker. 'But later, he saw that unmarried women in Indian society had no social status and were humiliated. So it was in the spirit of social service that he began to marry women in order to help them escape the stigma.'

Every time he married a woman, he gave her one or two hectares of land. He has had 29 children from his 90 marriages.