The sanitary sisterhood

One survey shows that 68-70 per cent of rural Indian women cannot afford sanitary napkins. Another survey puts the number close to 312 million menstruating women, who shun expensive sanitary pads in favour of unsterilised rags or locally available dried biomass. This situation partly stems from the fact that drugstores selling sanitary pads are rarely run by women.

Implications of this social taboo are manifold: nine out of 10 women are constrained by their own bodies every single month, leading to irreparable health problems, and one out of four adolescent girls skips school a few days every month and many drop out of school on reaching puberty. Pooled together, it is the cause for women’s diminished self-worth.

Pulling a finished piece of sanitary pad from the machine and talking without an iota of hesitation from under their veils, Shingari and Radha present a great contrast. The sanitary pad offers a measure of their self-esteem as they demonstrate the finer steps in its making. It is a seven-step process from mixing absorbent paper with cotton to its sterilised packing, which their deft hands complete within minutes.

At Mundu ki Dhani, 20-odd km from the desert city of Barmer in Rajasthan, a group of 150 women from nearby dhani (hamlets) have been trained to manufacture sanitary pads by the Gramin Vikas Navyuvak Mandal, under the joint sponsorship of development agency Care and energy company Cairn. Working for a few hours each day in batches of 10-12, each woman earns about ₹600 a month.

Dasrath Singh, who manages the aptly named ‘Resham’ (meaning silk) centre, is well aware that this is hardly a new idea. However, for women in the desert it has been a never-before vocation that they were initially reluctant to engage in. Thanks to the International Fund for Agriculture Development (IFAD) project ‘Mitigating Poverty in Western Rajasthan’, women in most-backward districts have been organised into self-help groups and empowered to take up entrepreneurial activities to enhance their family incomes.

Though these are early days for the six-month-old venture, the group plans to increase production to cover its primary consumer base of over 4,200 self-help groups (with 8-10 women each) across six blocks in four districts.

A five-pad pack is sold at ₹15, almost one-third the cost of most other sanitary pads in the market. It costs ₹5-6 to produce a packet.

Over the past few years, hundreds of local brands of sanitary pads produced by women’s groups and small start-ups have come up across the country.

The simplified production technology offers scope not only for expansion of this cottage industry but also generating local employment for women.

Singh has no illusions of challenging the country’s ₹1,350 crore sanitary-pad industry. “Our primary aim is to empower women and restore their diminished self-worth,” he asserts.

The writer is a Delhi-based development analyst and an expert in environmental sciences

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