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India’s ‘no toilet, no bride’ campaign first step for female health and safety

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Summary of story from nytimes 15.3.11

For thousands of women across India, pharm the existence of a toilet near their workplace is no small thing.

It limits the mobility of women and their ability to work efficiently.

Many rapes in slums and rural India happen in areas where women have to walk a long way to reach the toilet.

There is also a link between providing separate toilets for girls in schools and girls’ dropout rates.

The shortage or absence of public toilets for women in India, or the availability of something as basic as low-cost sanitary napkins, stress the invisibility of women’s needs.

But as campaigns like the “No Toilet, No Bride” effort in the northern state of Haryana make an impact, India’s women are beginning to demand basic rights.

And a report found that 68 percent of rural women in India could not afford something as basic as a sanitary napkin.

It also found that reproductive tract infections were 70 per cent more prevalent among women who lacked access to such hygienic supplies for that time of the month.

In South India one entrepreneur campaigned to created a low-cost sanitary napkin that could be used by poor women in both urban and rural India.

Women were to use his company’s technology to set up their own manufacturing units at home.

His invention – a mini sanitary-napkin making machine – was awarded the best innovation national award by President of India Prathiba Patil in November 2009.

Procter & Gamble has recently entered a partnership with the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare’s National Rural Health Mission to produce inexpensive sanitary napkins for rural women in the northwestern state of Rajasthan.

But there is still a long way to go.

Asha Bibi, 46, who lives in a village in Uttar Pradesh, north of Delhi, considers commercial brands of sanitary napkins unaffordable; “Two packets cost as much as my food budget for a week.”

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