We are really happy to see the issue of the menstrual health and awareness taking up with Indian Media. In today’s papers we’ve read about UGER, a women’s group in Udaipur.
A graduate of NID, Lakshmi Murthy, who had been already running Vikalp Design, a social design and communication initiative to talk about sex education, launched a new endeavor in 2011. The Uger project started with 6 young women from low income families, who were then trained to cut sew and produce the simple and beautiful pads that Uger makes today. The mission was simple to educate young women about menstrual hygiene and benefits of the reusable products.
Lakshmi conducted PhD studies on sustainability in menstruation management to study the problem in depth.
Here what she shares about the project in one of the interviews:
The current situation on the ground is quite terrible. Plastic garbage lying in rural locations in Rajasthan was not common ten years ago. Today garbage is everywhere which includes sanitary waste such as napkins and diapers; however the volume is much lower than in cities and towns. Sanitary napkins are picked up by dogs, chewed and scattered around, causing both environmental and aesthetic pollution. Young girls are beginning to switch from cloth to commercially available napkins. Cloth is increasingly seen as old fashioned. The migration toward sanitary napkins is an upwardly mobile action, a status symbol, an “aspirational” product – in the same way as people move toward newer models of mobile phones or cars.
In the same breath, girls and women are also using inferior menstrual products available locally such as the“Time Piece” – a fleece like inexpensive , synthetic , non woven fabric that is not healthy.
We wanted to give young girls and women informed choices. We wanted to communicate to girls and women that there is dignity in reuse and that it is also a healthy option if reusable products are managed well. We thus included the whole community – especially men and we have been breaking silence on the subject of menstruation and management through the Surakshit Mahwari Abhiyan or Safe Menstruation Campaign.
One component of this larger piece of work is the Uger Pad initiative. The word Uger means a new beginning in Mewadi language which is the local language of South Rajasthan. We saw Uger pads as a new beginning in the way we think about and manage menstruation. We gratefully acknowledge the help given to us by Ecofemme at Auroville, Tamil Nadu, as we were developing samples of the Uger pads.
Ramnagar kachi basti – Udaipur – is a slum settlement of Lohars or Ironsmiths. The Uger Pad Centre is located in this basti. At present four women from the basti work at the centre. Production is supervised by a coordinator from Jatan Sansthan. The pads patterns are cut by hand and machine stitched.