With actor Akshay Kumar and his film Padman based on the real-life story of Arunachalam Muruganantham who invented and revolutionized the use of low-cost sanitary napkins for women, we discover the many PadWomen who are bringing about a revolution in tackling the problem in rural India. Deepanjali who has developed an organic and biodegradable version made it to Forbes India’s 30 Under 30 2017 list of Indians creating a new India.
Menstruation has always been a taboo with women being not even allowed to use certain spaces which might get ‘polluted’. There was a time, still prevalent in certain regions of India when women were not even allowed to stay in the house for the four-five days of ‘curse’ and made to live like some untouchable in an outhouse. Strangely, it is the women who have been responsible for passing on this ‘shame’ from generation to generation wrapped in brown paper and newspapers, disposed of off silently in the middle of the night as if it never happened.
Menstruation is a bodily function like so many others and yet it has been shrouded in silence and stigma. But finally this is changing and there are many women at the forefront who are trying to initiate a conversation around the subject to make it normal acceptable among everyone especially women. There is also a social battle going on to allow women to enter ‘sacred’ places during menstruation to fight the ‘unclean’ tag attached to it. There are many temples, the most famous among them being the Sabarimala temple in Kerala which does not allow women after puberty till menopause to enter its holy portals. But hopefully, all that will change with a legal battle on.
The Myna Mahila Foundation is one such organization that is making way for the much-needed conversation about women hygiene and health care. The foundation was started in 2015 by Saloni Jalota and named after the Myna bird which is known to be talkative. Jalota’s thrust has been to empower women to not only talk about their bodies and demand better health services but to also make those services available from door to door.
Working in association with Mahila Milan Sanghatan at Govandi, Myna manufactures high-quality sanitary napkins at an affordable price. They have also formed a trusted network that sells these pads door to door in Mumbai Slums. While the Myna Pads are sold door to door and public bathrooms, it also produces maternity pads that are sold to local clinics and hospitals. To spread awareness about menstrual hygiene, the foundation also gives a demo to the users by giving them instructions as to how to use the sanitary napkins. Making sanitary napkins affordable and accessible, Myna pads are marked at Rs 25 for 8 pieces and they also loan packets to families with five to six female members that can be repaid once the family is financially stable
A foundation that started with the idea to gain some extra credits through social work, Myna Mahila Foundation reaches over 10,000 women a month making sanitary napkins accessible to each and every woman.
The recent film, Padman, by Bollywood, has also attempted to make the subject more universal. Starring Bollywood hunk Akshay Kumar as the real-life Arunachalam Muruganantham the film tells his story of providing affordable sanitary napkins to rural women, to create awareness and help them liberate themselves from myths and taboos existing around the topic of menstruation is commendable.
Apart from successfully shifting the closed door conversations to the living room areas of middle-class families, the film also brought to the fore the statistics of sanitary napkins use in the country and behind-the-scene dynamics of the business - in terms of its production value and sale cost. It’s alarming that only 12% of women in India have access to or can actually use sanitary napkins. Equally alarming is the fact a large part of this minuscule number don’t even know what goes into the making of a sanitary napkin.
Deepanjali Dalmia is another woman who is battling the same problem. Deepanjali quit her high-paying job in Manhattan to come back to Delhi to start manufacturing what she claims are biodegradable sanitary napkins. Her initial research on the subject had revealed that 90% of sanitary napkins are made up of plastic that is harmful to a woman’s body.
Deepanjali set out to develop something natural by testing different plant fibres. That was the beginning of HeyDay, her sanitary brand, made up of organic materials such as bamboo and corn fibre. She used seven layers of bamboo and corn fibre to give the napkins softness and making it highly absorbent and antibacterial. Deepanjali went one step further and set up her production facilities abroad as she found that Indian soil was not free of chemicals.
Another brand Carmesi, led by Tanvi Johri, has also created pads out of bamboo and cornstarch. Their idea was based on the fact that the cornstarch eliminates the risk of skin issues like itchiness or harsh rashes while the bamboo fibre provides complete leakage protection along with a back sheet which is made of compostable bio-plastic.
Anshu Gupta is the founder of Goonj, which re-positions what urban households discard as a development resource for villages. Goonj deals with over 3,000 tonnes of material annually. At Goonj, they make pads from old cloth; nearly 40 to 50 lakh pads at their centre in Sarita Vihar, East Delhi. Gupta won the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2015. He believes that the pad is just a product and the solution really is access, affordability and awareness.
Anshu Gupta is going back to promoting cloth — which large-scale commercial producers once rejected to build a case for gel-based pads — Sonal Jain of Boondh makes reusable menstrual cups of inert silicon, which has become cheaper over the years.
Suhani Mohan, an IIT-Bombay graduate, founded Saral Designs in 2015 with the aim of increasing access to highquality affordable sanitary napkins using innovative technology.
These young and enterprising entrepreneurs are doing their bit to help women deal with an important issue which was never even spoken about for generations. But this needs a greater government intervention at the policy level and also at the level of state-level official to take this forward. In 2015, the Ministry of Drinking Water and Sanitation released a document titled ‘National Guidelines for Menstrual Health Management’ that laid down guidelines for menstrual hygiene and management as a critical segment of the Swachh Bharat Mission. But how far it has really taken effect is anybody’s guess.
There are many government agencies and NGOs which are also trying to do their bit in the field. But a lot of the schemes are not followed up or are badly or ill-designed not keeping the end consumer in mind. Such as the Praveen Lata Sansthan in Rajasthan’s Ramgarh district which carries out awareness campaigns in the villages of Alwar district. The agency has installed napkin vending machines in the school but these are never refilled. Second, most girls in villages who attend such government schools will never be comfortable inserting a 10 rupee coin to get three pads in public view. Also, many of them may not even be able to afford two proper meals a day leave alone the money for the pads.
Apart from all the innovative ways, there are those who are trying to popularize the conventional method of using cloth and cotton. Most women in villages still use cloth as their only affordable means. And so some NGOs are teaching women to stitch their own pads using flannel and cotton while some are being imparted the skill of making such sanitary pads on a large scale to help other women to access these. But a lot more needs to be done to make it a game-changing movement.
But a revolution seems to be on its way with many a PadWomen leading the process of change in an area which is so crucial to every woman and yet has been silenced for centuries with stories of taboo and shame