‘Donating discarded clothes is not charity'

• In rural parts of Kutch, women neither use a cloth nor sanitary pad during menstrual cycle because of dearth of clothes, their traditional ghaghra and lack of awareness about hygiene. 

• Women in backward states use ash, wood- pulp, jute, stone and even plastic as sanitary napkins because of unavailability of clothes or such napkins during menses. In one such case, a woman used a glove with a hook as a pad and died of infection. 

• In rural areas, lack of access to hygiene leads to 30% to 40% of women in reproductive age of 13 to 40 getting infected. In some extreme cases this ends up in hysterectomy.
  

Even as urban Indian women turn to ‘ultra thin’ sanitary pads that promise both comfort and hygiene, their counterparts in rural areas still struggle to find enough clothes to make a sanitary pad. 

This was revealed by Anshu Gupta, founder of GOONJ, a social enterprise, who was in Ahmedabad to deliver a lecture at Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM-A) on Tuesday. 

But there is a ray of hope and you can be the reason why hygiene will finally come to several parts of the country and state. All that you have to do is donate a pair of clothes as part of the Joy of Giving Week. 

“What these women want is small piece of clean handkerchief to use as sanitary pad and nothing else.” said Gupta whose organisation promotes ‘cloth for work’ concept and makes around 1.5 lakh to 2 lakh cloth pieces to be used as sanitary pads. These pads are then sent to 21 states in India. 

The organisation collects clothes as donation. It then makes economical cloth pads for poor and rural women. 

The sale from such pads and various other products made from donated clothes lends a financial help to the organisation. 

Gupta with his team of around 100 people visits different pockets of rural India and interacts with women, understands their problem related to hygiene during menstruation and makes them aware about the cloth pad and other hygiene issues. 

"During our interaction, we also found that many poor women don't use anything during five days of menses as they don't have old pieces of cloth to be used as pads, he said.  He says that assuming a village has around 1,000 women and one woman needs around 7 to 8 pads, there is a need for around 7,000- 8,000 cloth pads per month and around 40,000- 50,000 cloth pads per year.  He, however, says that when people donate, they generally give away what they don't want rather than donating what others want. "If we want to donate clothes, why wait for disaster to happen. There are people who don't have clothes and in winter die because of that," Gupta said. 

Gupta insisted that though talking about sanitary pads is considered to be a taboo, it is time to start discussing the issue. "There are women around you- kaamwali, presswali, sabziwali etc. Talk to them, understand their need in those five days and help them out," he says.