Akshay Kumar\u2019s Pad Man is set for release. It tells the story of Tamil Nadu\u2019s Arunachalam Muruganantham, a social entrepreneur and activist, who<\/p>\n
revolutionised sanitary hygiene in rural India by inventing a machine to make low-cost sanitary pads.<\/p>\n
My association with the Delhi NGO, Goonj in 2010-11 was my first brush with the crisis in menstrual health in India.<\/p>\n
It all began in 2010. Wanting to contribute old clothes, I started browsing their website for dropping centres in south Delhi. I knew that they were was all about<\/p>\n
the vastra (cloth) — the kapda in roti, kapda aur makaan (bread, cloth and house). I had known that they took old clothes, would repair\/cut\/modify them and then<\/p>\n
distribute them among the have-nots.
\nThey insisted that old clothes being contributed should adhere to a certain standard — no torn and tattered clothes were accepted, for instance.<\/p>\n
In the process, I came across another phenomenon — the issue of sanitary napkins and lack of menstrual hygiene in much of India. A story on their website<\/p>\n
about the relationship of cloth with menstruation shook me to the core. It was the case of a woman who had died of tetanus, which she contracted from a rusted<\/p>\n
hook in the piece of blouse she used during periods. I read about how women in rural areas and urban slums used rags, sand even ash in the absence of clean<\/p>\n
cloth.
\nThere was more to come — many women used the same piece of cloth among other women of their household as menstrual cycles were different, some used<\/p>\n
the same piece of cloth for months till it tore off, others still were forced to have their uterus removed at a child-bearing age or face infections and risk of cervical<\/p>\n
cancer because of unhygienic menstrual practices. This is not to discount the restrictions and taboos they constantly faced.<\/p>\n
Anshu Gupta, the founder of Goonj and a Magsaysay award winner in 2015, while touring Dharavi slum in Mumbai, found that many women wouldn\u2019t even dry<\/p>\n
their washed cloth out in the sun as they lived in constricted spaces. They would hang them behind doors to avoid being visible to men! As a result, they would<\/p>\n
end up wearing partially wet cloth, over and over again!<\/p>\n
What was, however, an eye opener was the discovery that the organisation also provided cloth pads to scores of women in the Below the Poverty Line (BPL)<\/p>\n
level. A cloth pad? I was intrigued. On further investigation, I found that the organisation converted contributed stitched piece of clothing into an unstitched cloth<\/p>\n
roll — clothes were first cut, buttons and zips etc removed, washed, ironed and then rolled into a \u2018pad\u2019. What\u2019s more, it used no plastic and is, hence,<\/p>\n
environment-friendly. Several such pads were then packed together and made into what they called \u2018My Pad Dignity Pack\u2019. It includes 10 re-usable cloth pads,<\/p>\n
one undergarment and a lot of awareness about do\u2019s and don\u2019ts of menstrual hygiene.
\nRadhika Apte as Gayatri, Lakshmikant Chauhan\u2019s wife and his inspiration.<\/p>\n
Piqued, I asked Meenakshi Gupta of the organisation on how they got down to doing this. She mentioned how when they started, the team would tour the length<\/p>\n
and breadth of India trying to understand the crisis in cloth. Slowly but steadily they picked up stories of women and their experiences. In 2004, when the Indian<\/p>\n
Ocean tsunami struck, the Tamil Nadu government handed them tons of unused cloth. It was then that they thought of cloth pads.<\/p>\n
My own experience with cloth has been, at best an irritant, but nowhere close to what so many Indian women face. I was perhaps in Class VIII, when out of<\/p>\n
compulsion, I had to use a clean and dry dhoti as a pad. I too have washed and re-used the cloth, but I had the luxury of availability of clean water, an antiseptic<\/p>\n
and disinfectant like Dettol and sunlight. I didn\u2019t have to struggle with any taboo. I now recall how my elder aunt would talk of life in her times — how everyone, of<\/p>\n
course, used old cotton saris and dhotis during periods, how privacy was never an issue because the men of the household would hardly come to certain<\/p>\n
sections of the house, which were exclusively the preserve of the women. Hers was, of course, a privileged upbringing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Akshay Kumar\u2019s Pad Man is set for release. It tells the story of Tamil Nadu\u2019s Arunachalam Muruganantham, a social entrepreneur and activist, who revolutionised sanitary hygiene in rural India by inventing a machine to make low-cost sanitary pads. My association with the Delhi NGO, Goonj in 2010-11 was my first brush with the crisis in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21014,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-21013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21013"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21015,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21013\/revisions\/21015"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}