War. Disease. Pestilence. Alex Wotherspoon's continuing survival on The Apprentice. Sometimes it seems as if all news is bad news. But how about this for an incontrovertibly cheering development: the divorce rate in India has increased 100 per cent in the past five years.

Of course, divorce statistics should never be taken at face value. It turns out that the famous “fact” that US marriages have a 50 per cent chance of failure was based on someone once dividing the number of divorces in a particular year by the number of marriages in the same year, which is almost as mathematically nonsensical as determining the popularity of cheese products by dividing sales of Mini Cheddars in 1998 by sales of Cheesy Wotsits in 2003.

And, as is so often the case with Indian data, the number doesn't quite withstand analysis. It was quoted recently by the founder of secondshaadi.com, a website for those seeking to remarry, but it transpires that official national statistics for the sub-continent are in fact unavailable because divorces are handled on a local level. However, local figures back up the gist of the trend - over the past four years the divorce rate in Delhi has doubled, for instance - and I'm sure you'll agree with me that the development is worthy of being marked with celebratory bhangra.

Though, having said that, and having just read around the subject, you might not agree at all. Everywhere that the divorce rate is rising - and it is doing so in China, Indonesia, Italy and Spain, to name a few countries - people have a tendency of not being very relaxed about it. Governments have commissioned studies into the trend, blaming everything from Viagra to internet dating, while marital breakdown has been accused of causing everything from gang violence to juvenile delinquency and teenage suicides.

So I'll concede that divorce is not always a family pack of cheesy Wotsits, or even a free packet of mini Cheddars. But the rising rate of separations in India should nevertheless be welcomed for one simple reason: it shatters once and for all the myth that arranged marriages are more successful than their Western counterparts.

I spent my twenties trying and failing to fulfil my family's desire for me to succumb to a betrothal to a good Sikh girl and if I had a penny every time someone - English and Indian - remarked, “actually, arranged marriages do very well, maybe you should give it a shot”, I could have solved the problem by purchasing several mail-order brides.

Last year this moronic viewpoint even informed an entire BBC TV series called Arrange Me a Marriage, in which Aneela Rahman, a Glaswegian “matchmaker” with an accent so piercing that she made Cilla Black sound measured, got families to match their single relatives according to class, education, family background, life goals and earnings.

“For your typical Brit, meeting someone is quite random,” she trilled. "Going out, getting drunk, falling into bed...I mean, you wouldn't buy your car drunk, so why would you expect to find a life partner like that?” Leaving aside the implication that being set up with a date on a TV show is somehow healthier than making a drunken pass at someone in a bar, I object to all of Rahman's arguments vehemently.

Marrying someone on the basis of class and money is superficial. Families are the last people who should be entrusted with the task of finding you a spouse, for they are incapable of appreciating that you may have changed since the age of 12. And the high “success” rate of arranged marriages relative to their Western counterparts is in large part attributable to two rather unsavoury factors, the first of which is repression.

Indian youth are so limited in their encounters with the opposite sex that, when they are married off to a random gimp their parents approve of, they have nothing to measure the relationship against and endure behaviour others wouldn't consider reasonable over a single evening let alone a lifetime.

Second, many arranged marriages survive simply because divorce is not a realistic option for those involved. Indeed, Hindi offers no word for “divorce” - the phrase people tend to use is the Urdu word talak - and until now those stuck in abusive or dysfunctional relationships would simply have to endure whatever came their way, because they were instructed it was their “kismet”, or destiny, to do so.

Such a sense of duty can, of course, be noble and Western celebrities who marry and divorce more often than they floss their teeth could learn from it. My parents had an arranged marriage and my mother stuck with my father through some extremely challenging times because she grew to love him and felt a profound sense of duty to make things work out. I'm grateful that she did, not least because I wouldn't have been born otherwise, but no one should be compelled to endure hardship. Similarly, I wish that the handful of Indian women on the street I grew up on in the West Midlands, who were regularly beaten up by their brutal husbands, had had the option of escaping.

I don't think their traumatised children would have been worse off as a result and I hope those politicians who bewail the breakdown of the institution of marriage here in Britain, where the divorce rate is actually at a 30-year low, appreciate that the institution of divorce is worth defending with as much as seriousness and passion.

sathnam@thetimes.co.uk

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