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| Napkins for dignity | | A 59-year-old woman?s initiative in memory of her daughter who died in 2003 |
| Indulekha Aravind / Feb 05, 2012, 00:28 IST |
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“Sanitary napkins and menstruation are still taboo subjects. When we start to talk about our initiative at kitty parties and birthday parties, women shush us while men look the other way,” says 59-year-old Kala Charlu, the greying but enthusiastic founder of MITU, or Multiple Initiatives Towards Upliftment.
MITU may be about multiple initiatives but one of its thrust areas is donating eco-friendly and low-cost sanitary napkins to girls from economically backward sections. Charlu started MITU in memory of her daughter Maitreyi who, she says, would try to convince shopkeepers on Brigade Road to stop using plastic bags. This was 18 years ago, when “going green” was not the fashionable idea it is today. Another year, on Valentine’s Day, Maitreyi decided she wanted to distribute T-shirts to pavement dwellers at midnight. So, when Maitreyi died in an accident in 2003, Charlu wanted to start something to honour her daughter’s efforts. Thus, MITU was born.
Charlu decided to focus on sanitary napkins after hearing about someone in Delhi who was doing the same thing. “That somehow struck a chord with us,” she says. This initiative is called Desire to Donate Dignity.
Charlu and her 10 volunteers, many of them senior citizens, begin by making napkins out of discarded cotton cloth. The cloth is first thoroughly washed in an antiseptic solution, and then cut and packed. The napkins made from this cloth are distributed in government schools.
According to figures on the MITU website, just 12 per cent of women in India use sanitary napkins. The rest use unsanitised cloth, ash, sand and husk — and as a result are more vulnerable to infections. An adolescent girl needs eight to 10 napkins a month.
After she had started Desire to Donate Dignity, Charlu stumbled upon the Cauvery Matha Trust in Periyapatna, in Mysore district. This trust makes sanitary napkins from wood pulp, and they cost just Rs 3 a piece, about a third of the average market price. These are more user-friendly and became more popular than the cloth napkins Charlu had been making, so she started distributing them in schools. The wood pulp, she says, is like blotting paper. These napkins contain 12 gm each of wood pulp, in contrast to branded napkins that have 6-8 gm of absorbent materials. “We do a demonstration before we distribute the napkins,” she says, “by pouring water slowly on our napkin and the branded ones. You can see which one is more absorbent.”
“Disastrous” is how she describes MITU’s first attempt to distribute its napkins to girls in a government school. “We had taken girls from Mount Carmel College as volunteers, and they talked to the girls in English.” The school students thought they should try and impress these English-speaking visitors, so, Charlu says, “they started lying about the kind of napkins they were using.” To top it all, the principal, a man, told the volunteers not to return to distribute sanitary napkins. “He told us that if we wanted, we could distribute books and clothes, but not the napkins!”
MITU’s next venture, at a village school, was much more successful. And the group now distributes two consignments of napkins a month to the 350-400 girls studying in government schools in villages, as well as to NGOs. Charlu also continues to make 600-800 cloth napkins a month.
To meet the cost of the napkins, Charlu and her volunteers get bags, keychains, wine-bottle covers and pouches made out of cloth discarded by tailors and sell them at melas and exhibitions. This fits with her other principle of recycling. MITU also teaches women to make bags out of waste paper.
On the eve of her organisation’s Founder’s Day, February 5, the former school teacher says she is contemplating changing her model to charge a nominal amount for the napkins, because the value of things, she says, is better understood when it comes at a cost. Charlu is also considering embarking on manufacturing the napkins, because she feels a day will come “when I reach thousands of women”.
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