World Menstrual Hygiene Day may have come and gone but it is never too late to assess the taboos associated with menstruation in India. In the next five years, nearly 55 million girls in India will get their first period out of which 18 million are unaware about the phenomenon of periods till it comes to pass.
If you were to take stock of how ignorant we are of women’s health issues, it would take quite a while for the situation is grim. Most schools do not conduct any special classes on menstrual health; in fact many school teachers have been known to skip this particular topic while teaching the reproduction system.
Only 12% of women and girls in India have access to hygienic ways to manage their periods. From using rags to straws of bamboo, thanks to the social stigma associated with discussing it openly and the rising costs of such products, many rural women either do not know about sanitary napkins, or cannot afford it. Majority of urban India too do not even know about the existence of tampons, menstrual cups and the various other options for menstrual hygiene apart from pads.
“I was 12 when I had my first period and I was asked to keep it a secret from my father and brother as if it was an unspeakable sin,” says Aditi Gupta who is the founder of Menstrupedia. When Aditi’s Biology teacher skipped the subject she decided something needed to be done. “All my life everyone had taught me to keep it a secret, almost as if it was something to be ashamed of. In my ignorance, I learned to be ashamed of my own body in order to stay decent according to society’s standards.”
Aditi Gupta started Menstrupedia and went on to create the Menstrupedia comic, a friendly guide to periods for girls. Her husband and co-founder Tuhin Paul decided to create a learning tool that could tackle the taboo around menstruation when they were in studying at the National Institute of Design. The Menstrupedia comics are now used by more than 75 schools, 25 NGOs and 70,000 girls across India.
“It was quite clear that our target audience was young girls above the age of 9 years. We wanted to give them a handbook to educate them. But in doing so we also had to make the book fun to read. Kids in their suspension of disbelief find it easy to believe what is told in a comic or through a cartoon,” she says.
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As they designed the characters in the comic, they decided that there would be a doctor in the strip to give her strictures credibility as she answered the queries of the young girls. From girls who had never had their period, ones who had it for the first time, the comic gave a space to raise questions that are there in any average girl’s mind who is going through puberty.
Research has shown that 3 out of 10 girls in India are unaware of periods when they first get one and in parts of Rajasthan this figure goes up to 9 out of 10 girls. Any girl undergoing this inevitable change in their life would have a million question in her mind and Menstrupedia is one such tool to answer most of these queries. Menstrupedia has brought a wide range of topics under its umbrella from hormones to how a baby is made, the comic is an excellent substitute for the sex education classes most schools in our country are in dire need of. 
Aditi now hopes to take Menstrupedia beyond India’s borders. “We want to produce the comic for all South Asian countries, and we want to do it for African countries too,” she says. “We want to build an educational infrastructure, not only for girls but for everybody, to talk about periods in a friendly and in a free manner. I want to raise a generation of girls who are period positive when they themselves become mothers, who would raise their own girls to speak openly about periods, in the hopes that this taboo would completely get erased from existing generations.”
Aditi believes that this is just the beginning for her and even if it takes decades to wipe out the stigma against menstruation, she is willing to pledge her life to the cause.
Note: This is an InUth Original.
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