Focusing on menstrual care in time of pandemic
NEWDELHI: For the past 11 years, anganwadi worker Pushpa Devi of Dablain village in Haryana’s Jind district leaves her home at 10 am for a few days each month. Along with 10 other women, she distributes sanitary napkins to the women of the village, free of cost. All the women are members of a self help group formed in 2004 and make these napkins with cloth. Like Devi, many of the women who accompany her on her rounds are anganwadi workers who have been tasked by the state government to distribute ration from the local Integrated Child Development Services centre to beneficiaries. This has proved to be a boon, as their sanitary napkin rounds continue unaffected.
Women’s menstrual care in India is an area of concern: most rural women are unable to use hygiene products either due to lack of awareness of products like sanitary napkins and safe practises during menstruation, or due to their inability to purchase these products. According to the 2015-2016 family health survey, 51.8% women in rural areas used unhygienic methods of protection or none at all during their menstrual cycles. The government terms sanitary napkins, including homemade ones, and tampons, hygienic methods of protection.
Poonam Muttreja of the Population Fund, a non governmental organisation working in the area of gender sensitive policies on population and health said that cloth, if not used hygienically, can lead to lots of infections. “Urinary tract infections can happen if cloth is not used properly. Soap and sun, which are needed to keep the cloth hygienic, are sometimes not availed of by women, as reproductive health is a private issue and women tend to hide the clothes,” Muttreja said.
The group was trained to make sanitary napkins in 2009 after a bureaucrat in the local administration initiated the effort. “We bring the material from Delhi, and unlike commercial napkins, our pads are biodegradable,” Devi said over the phone from her village.
“We have even trained women in other villages to make them and even how to use them. We tell them that reusing cloth is unhygienic and can lead to infections.”
The group now has a facility in the village where women can make these napkins; there, the women have uninterrupted power supply, required to operate some of the sewing machines needed to stitch the pads. During the lockdown, the women have distributed over 500 packets in their village of 5000 residents, Devi said. The group also sells napkins — each packet has six, and costs ~12 — to women from other villages who want to sell them in their communities.
Though the work that they do is vital, anganwadi workers continue to remain at high risk as they work without much protection. There are no protective gear at all provided to these women, and anganwadi workers either buy or make the masks that they wear. The need for protective gear have been echoed by several anganwadi associations. Concerns mounted in Jind as four women tested positive for Covid-19 earlier this week.
Suman, secretary of Jind’s Anganwadi Association, said that the women were on duty at Nidani village, and their samples were collected. “They tested positive, and were moved to Rohtak. Though we were told later that they are not positive, without protective gear, the women [anganwadi workers] are scared to move around in the village,” she said.