User:Tjp1234/Menstrual hygiene management

Article Draft

Inadequate access to menstrual hygiene equipment and education is a public health crisis. This, coupled with a society that frequently makes women feel shameful while menstruating and fails to foster positive or productive conversation about menstrual health management is even worse. The latter is the unfortunate reality for women in many parts of India, especially in rural areas. This paper uses both primary and secondary data retrieved from experiences in rural India to corroborate the claim that rural Indian women are not only at a major health risk due to their inability to afford or access sanitary period products, but are also embedded in a culture fueled by religious Hindu ideologies that portrays menstruation in a shameful light.  

Period poverty is widespread in India, particularly in rural regions and the slums. Rajput and Jain write in their book titled “Social and Sustainability Marketing”, “Menstruation is considered a high burden on families living below the poverty line or in rural areas”. As a result, they claim women experience “a series of diseases, infections, poor menstrual hygiene, and deprived nutritional status”. They claim that it takes not only a physical toll on women, but an emotional one too, “resulting in depression, anxiety, and hormonal imbalances” (Rajput & Jain 2021). Moreover, menstruation is a large topic of conversation culturally in India. It is often viewed as taboo and religiously impure according to Hinduism. The way in which many Indian families treat women in their households while they are menstruating is reflected in the Netflix movie, Pad Man. The movie is centered around a woman named Gayatri and her husband, Lakshmi. In the movie, Gayatri and her sisters-in-law are banned from their home while menstruating and are considered impure. They are fed the Hindu belief that menstruating is equivalent to pollution and that they have no place in areas like their houses, their beds, the kitchen, or the temple while on their periods. While Pad Man is just a movie, it is far from fiction. For many women in India, this is simply reality.

Twenty years ago, a man named Arunachalam Muruganantham from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, invented a low-cost sanitary pad-making machine in order to reduce cost and increase access of sanitary menstrual pads for women living in rural India. Kimiko and Miki’s article discusses how Muruganantham’s work was inspired by witnessing his wife use unsanitary materials such as dirty rags to attend to her period because buying commercial pads was too pricey. His response was to create a machine that could manufacture sanitary pads quickly and cheaply and distribute it to rural women just like his wife who suffer from period poverty. His machine can create menstrual pads for under a third of the cost of those on the commercial market and, according to the article, they have been installed in “1,300 villages in 23 Indian states, with plans to eventually reach more than 100 countries” (Kimiko & Miki 2019). Muruganantham ignored the shame and taboo present in India’s culture that comes with menstruation and served as an example to all Indian husbands around the nation that they, too, should care about their wives’ and daughters’ menstrual health and hygiene. The fact that Muruganantham did not simply sell his machine to the highest bidder, but rather provided it to rural regions home to thousands of women in need made him become widely regarded in India as a hero, taking on the title “Pad Man”.