10/10/2020
“I was 6 when mom suffered a miscarriage. When she told me, ‘God decided to keep your sister,’ I sobbed. A few years later, she told me the truth; that the miscarriage took place due to internal bleeding. At the age of 13, mom explained periods and pregnancy to me.
That’s when I started buying pads for her. But at the shop, everyone would look at me as if I’d lost my mind. Once, I asked a shopkeeper for Ultra pads, and he gave me Ultra ci******es. When I told him I wanted pads, he was shocked. People who saw me carrying pads would ask, ‘Iska kya karega bhai?’
Around then, I read an article about thousands of women dying annually because of the lack of menstrual hygiene. I decided to launch a pilot project called WASH to educate people on menstruation. I got 9 friends on board–we went to a basti in Dehradun where we did a street play and distributed pads. 25 women attended our workshop; they called me Doctor Babu! They opened up to us and said they couldn’t afford pads– they could either eat or buy pads.
So I went home and began researching affordable pads– I spoke to doctors, female friends and read case studies. I realised that the best solution was to make pads at home.
So our team made 35 pads using cotton. In our next workshop, we distributed materials so they could make them on their own. We did this in villages across India and before long, women started selling these pads for Rs.10 in their villages; it became their source of income.
I remember after one of our workshops, a little girl hugged me. She cried and said, ‘Bhaiyya, maine socha mein mar jaungi.’ She’d gotten her period for the first time and thought she’d bleed to death. I was devastated. We started providing counselling to women so that they could openly talk about their issues; we got counsellors and nutritionists on board.
At another workshop, a woman asked me, ‘Aapko bhi hota hai?’ I was shocked. That led me to start ‘Breaking The Bloody Taboos’, a campaign under which we held a workshop inside a temple; 50 menstruating women attended.
The WASH project is now active in 6 states and we’ve reached over 1.5 million women; we’re working on expanding to more parts of the country. We’ve even started digital pad making workshops.
But it's very hard to break through the stigma– even today, I get threat calls from strangers saying, ‘We’ll beat you if you spoil our women.’ I just say, ‘I won’t stop,’ and hang up. If they abuse more, I ask them to think about how they came into the world– through their mothers’ wombs, and then hang up.
We have a long, long way to go. All I know is that if we even want to come close to empowering women, we need to save their lives first.”
