Thane’s Municipal Corporation intervention on persuading the focus back on menstrual hygiene has been thoroughly acknowledged and appreciated. Period rooms being popularised for women put up in and around the city’s vicinity wouldn’t have been a success had Muse Foundation, an NGO, not tied, assisted and aided the efforts on the part of Thane Municipal Corporation.
Nishant Bangera, the founder of Muse Foundation, asserts that urinals never existed for women in public places in Thane, lowering the pride and dignity of the city’s women. In a 2019 survey carried by Muse Foundation in 15 slums of Thane, more than 67% of women do not have access to toilets at home. Also, in the absence of dustbins in public toilets, they were forced to dispose of sanitary products far from family members’ gaze.
But to bring a systematic behavioural change in these women’s mindsets, the foundation believes that this initiative would have been far from reality. Plus, the lack of access to women in towns and the countryside discourages them from discussing and debating their reproductive health and menstrual hygiene openly.
The organisation plans to conduct awareness sessions and surveys to get a fair sense of how period rooms in Thane have helped them tide over their hesitation and reservations on promoting menstrual hygiene.