It is a fact that an overwhelming majority of Indian women have no access to female hygiene products. It is a telling comment upon our society that films such as Padman have to be made to break the deafening silence around female menstruation. In 2019 we still have public service films persuading men to buy sanitary napkins for their womenfolk before the screening of films. Clearly there is a lot of work to be done to ensure that Indian women have access to simple hygiene and a modicum of dignity. The announcement regarding Suvidha sanitary napkins is a much needed, very welcome step. But there was one problem.
Out of an estimated 35 crore menstruating Indian women, 29 crores (or 82%) have no access to sanitary napkins. They use cloth, ash, sand, hay and other unhygienic, harmful substance during their periods. Now, subsidised Suvidha sanitary napkins will be available at 5,500 government centres across India, costing just 1 rupee each.
This scheme, if properly implemented, has the potential to be a real game changer for women's health, wellbeing and quality of life. It has the potential to improve women’s health, help more women enter the work force and start earning and lose fewer workdays. Women as well as men expressed their approval of the scheme in one voice.
Periods are like a shameful secret in our society. They are spoken of in hushed voices or not at all. Buying sanitary pads is usually an elaborate exercise shrouded in shame and secrecy. Men holding packets of sanitary napkins in their hands in a public forum is certainly a positive step towards breaking these age-old but senseless taboos. The very fact that a central minister of state tweeted the word ‘periods’ marks the possibility of a huge and welcome social change.
There is no doubt that the Suvidha initiative is a positive, much-needed one. However, most of us noticed that there are no women on the stage. Instead, there are five men holding up a product that they never have and never will use.
Not only are there no women on the stage. There are none in the banner behind them either, so far as we can make out from this picture, pointed out another commentator. Representation is important in any case, when it is a matter of a women's product that representation becomes all the more necessary.
As men stand on the stage and take the credit for an initiative funded as much by women as by men (because we all pay taxes, after all), women asked whether women were involved at all in the initiative. This is a product that is meaningless for men; who cannot have any real insight into its design, effectiveness or lack thereof. Hopefully there were women – at least behind the scenes – whose input and feedback was taken?
"Where are the women?" asked one commentator and many women and men pointed out the irony of women being completely absent from the lunch of a product for women. Some thought that there should have been some women present at least as a symbolic gesture while others asked why they couldn’t find any women to represent their own gender. This wit here replied "In the kitchen where they belong", This reply, if serious, underlines the problematic mindset that makes life difficult for women every day. If this is in jest, it still underlines how people still think that the subjugation and sidelining of women is somehow funny.
There is no doubt that the patriarchy is still well and firmly in place in India. It is still up to the men to empower women and to grant them freedoms and privileges which, as autonomous adults, should have been theirs to begin with. It is men who legislate for women and who presume to know what is good for them. It is men, with their paternalistic attitude, who want to ‘uplift’ women, while still infantilising them. It is men who make decisions for women; assuming that women are still incapable of exercising their own choice and free will – and this is not just true in our political space. It is true in our homes, our offices, schools and public spaces. Suvidha is a good step, but the road to women truly claiming their agency is a long, tortuous one and we don’t even know if when will reach its destination. And if.
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