We might think that being in a metropolitan city makes us modern but when it comes to menstrual hygiene it’s still a hush-hush affair where the chemists would still hand over the sanitary napkins to you in a black plastic bag or try to wrap it around multiple times in a newspaper.
This city based campaign called ‘Breaking the Silence’ is here to banish stigma around menstruation. It was started by sociologist Urmila Chanam and it enters its fifth year of an active campaign to lead from the ‘front line’. She has trained over 7000 adolescent girls and women in the last 4 years on biology of menstruation, menstrual hygiene management and safe and environment friendly disposal of used sanitary products in nooks and corners of India.
This year’s theme is Youth and Education where the focus will be youth and education institutions like schools, colleges, universities and special institutions like orphanages, rehabilitation centers.
While on her way to the state of Uttar Pradesh where she will be taking forward the campaign, Urmila tells us that, “The campaign works in such a manner that it collaborates massively across the country. As this year we focus on the youth, we want to build a group 20 students from each college who will talk about menstrual hygiene and negotiate with the authorities. Since menstrual hygiene has a lot of barriers in the society and isn’t considered something important. We want to put it on the forefront and make sure all these institutions can avail sanitary napkins conveniently and the disposal can also be done properly.”
Further, we reach out to the volunteers who each year participate in this campaign and ask them what inspired them to be a part of this. A young NGO worker, Keerthi Sagar says, “I think we all draw inspiration from the thought ‘be the change you wish to see in the world’. And this is what inspired us to join the campaign with Urmila. We can all work towards development, cleaning and other projects but when it comes to menstruation we realised that the whole taboo built around it has even restricted us from having an open dialogue towards women’s hygiene. And health cannot be secondary to any of the prejudice our society has developed.”
Growing up in a family that considers menstrual cycles as a taboo and overcoming it and now talking about it out in the open takes a lot of courage. But, nothing could stop Pratima Hebbar, a learning development professional and a mother of an 8-year-old daughter. She says, “I come from a Brahmin family where sitting with the family during your periods was considered impure. Being the rebellious girl, I was I always spoke up and stood up what I thought was wrong and from that time I knew menstrual cycles are not a hush-hush affair.
Every time I travel I always spread awareness especially to the underprivileged society and teach them about menstrual hygiene and the fact that they can freely speak of it.”
