Disaster recovery operations in India seldom consider the menstrual requirements of people. Often, the requirement of safe menstrual products and proper facilities to use them are ignored by the relief workers.
In India, the restoration work is usually limited to restructuring and rebuilding of houses. The needs for menstruation and personal hygiene are not researched and executed during the operations. Periods don’t stop during a disaster, then why are menstrual needs neglected during relief programs in India?
Menstruators, especially young girls face multiple problems while managing periods during natural disasters. Unhealthy conditions are rampant during and post such situations. Lack of clean water and proper food leads to the spread of diseases like diarrhea, typhoid, and dysentery. Skin diseases as a consequence of consuming contaminated water are also prevalent.
Disaster relief often ignores the needs of menstruators affected by the incident.
In addition, menstruating people have an added burden of managing their periods. Often, women use unhygienic resources like used clothes, rags, and even sand for their periods which leads to more diseases and skin problems.
How do relief operations ignore the plight of menstruators?
A government study post the Assam floods of 2012, lays that during the production of relief kits, menstrual products were casually overlooked by the government. Further, the relief camps lacked adequate facilities for women to wash, dry, and change their menstrual products. Due to inundation, women living in villages and marginalized areas lacked clean water supply to wash their used blood-stained clothes.
Even during cyclone Phailin in Odisha, 2013, many women feared losing access to sanitary pads due to curfew restrictions. Post the cyclone, the relief programs focused entirely on providing shelter and food but again, menstrual needs were neglected. Women in general were responsible for most of the housework which when added with the neglect of their menstrual health resulted in them contacting various fungal diseases and infections.
The chief requirement for healthy menstrual practices during a relief operation, thus, remains clean water. An integrated approach towards providing Water, Sanitation, And Hygiene ( WASH ) facilities for menstrual hygiene management should be included in the framework while designing rescue and relief operations by the government.
Another cultural wave in India can be noticed which resists women from publicly accessing relief camps or even the public use of menstrual products because of the conventional mindset
It’s important that we also talk about the repercussions that the lockdown due to the spread of novel coronavirus has on the menstrual needs of people. Quarantine and lockdown have made it difficult for women who belong to low-income groups to access adequate products, safe private places to change/dispose of the product, and most importantly clean water supply.
The Situation In The Pandemic
Even before the pandemic, many women in India suffered from a lack of sanitary practices. Now, due to the shutdown of a few subsidized programs and shops, access to menstrual products has been limited. In some states in India like Haryana and New Delhi, girls used to get sanitary pads for free from their government school authorities. Due to the shutdown of schools, their access to menstrual products has been cut. People who have been quarantined or have tested positive for the virus are also finding it difficult to maintain menstrual hygiene within the facilities.
The situation is worse in states like Jharkhand where menstrual products were initially not declared as an essential commodity. The rationing framework in the state is very discriminating against menstruating women as sanitary pads were not being made available in relief packages, only basic food was provided in the packages.
This might also be because although we don’t have any extra tax on sanitary pads, the price of a single pad is still way more than it should be. Further, when in some containment zones of the country, sanitary pads were distributed, non-menstruators were found throwing away the pads. This might be because of the existence of the incessant taboos and myths around the biological phenomena.
There needs to be an effort in imparting knowledge about menstruation to everyone barring their gender to avoid the lack of awareness and misconceptions about the issue.
We also need to analyze the impact of disasters on women’s menstrual hygiene conditions, including realizing the importance of providing them with clean and private spaces within the relief camps. Certain drawbacks in the programs or activities taken by the government and other organizations working towards disaster relief should be amended and proper research operations should be undertaken regarding this issue.