This ‘Padman Of Jharkhand’ Quit His Job To End The Stigma Around Menstruation

Spread the love

During his interactions with the villagers, Mangesh Jha was alarmed to find out that most women used grass, sand, ash and even cow dung mixed with husk as pads during menstruation.

From restrictions on touching utensils and entering puja rooms to the hush-hush around buying sanitary napkins, the taboos around menstruation in India seems a long way from being over. With the stigma around menstruation rampant across the country, conversations around menstrual hygiene often take a back step. And when it’s a man that’s championing the cause, it gets all the more difficult to raise the subject with women, especially those belonging to the rural areas.

However, 31-year-old Mangesh Jha, popularly known as ‘Padman of Jharkhand’, has taken it upon himself to educate the women in the villages of Jharkhand. Undaunted by the challenges, the youngster has been on an advent to end the taboos around menstruation and to impart the habit of menstrual hygiene to rural women.

“During the Ambubachi Mela, we worship Goddess Kamakhya to celebrate her menstruation – our mythology says that Goddess Durga bleeds for four days. We consider this as such an auspicious event and celebrate it with all fervour. But what about the Durga in our own homes – our wives, daughters, and sisters?” asks Jha.

India has nearly 336 million menstruating women and adolescent girls. Of this, only 57.6 per cent of young Indian women (15-24 years) use a hygienic method of protection during their menstrual cycle, reported the National Family and Health Survey (2015-2016). In Jharkhand, only 49.6 of women followed hygienic menstrual practices and the figure stood at 39.4 in rural India.

According to data collected by the Ministry of Health, only 12% of women and girls have access to sanitary napkins. While there are several government-run programs to distribute sanitary pads, these often do not reach the grassroots.

Alarmed by these staggering figures, the youngster from Ranchi quit his job in 2013 to champion the cause of menstrual hygiene. Today, he has influenced nearly 1500 villages across Jharkhand and around 6000 households to practice menstrual hygiene.

The Beginning

Jha completed his graduation from Institute of Hotel Management, Bhubaneswar, in 2008. He then worked with hotels in Kolkata and Pune before moving to Ranchi in 2013.

While in Ranchi, he would travel around the city during weekends. “While Google had painted a pretty picture of Jharkhand, the reality was different,” he recalls. It was when he realised the plight of the villagers on the outskirts of Ranchi that the youngster decided to bid adieu to his job. While he started out by providing night school to the villagers, he soon began helping them with farming and employment.

As he got more involved with the villagers, he was alarmed to find out that most women used grass, sand, ash and even cow dung mixed with husk as pads during menstruation. Back then, Jha barely knew about menstruation or what a sanitary pad even looked like.

He then went home and told his mother about his interest in spreading awareness about menstrual hygiene. “My mother didn’t speak to me for seven days when I told her about my decision,” Jha recalls.

However, once Jha explained to her about the predicament of the villagers, his mother was the first to extend a hand of support. While his mother and sister helped him understand menstruation better, he researched about ways to help.

The Darker Side Of Sanitary Pads

While sanitary pads are crucial during menstruation, they pose a number of threats – environmental pollution being one of the biggest. Improper disposal of sanitary pads is not only extremely harmful to the environment, but it can also spread various diseases.

“After the release of the movie Padman in 2018, there was a sudden spike in the number of people that visited villages to distribute sanitary pads. While this helped the villagers, it also led to an increase in sanitary waste. If every woman in these villages started using sanitary pads regularly, can you imagine how huge a threat it posed to the environment?” asks Jha.

On an average, a woman uses around 10,000 sanitary pads in a lifetime. This means that a single user can generate nearly 125 kg of sanitary waste. According to reports, India creates a shocking 1.13 lakh tonnes of menstrual waste annually. These can take over 250 years to decompose fully.

To reduce the pile-up of sanitary waste, he educated the women to also make use of clothes during menstruation, a knowledge imparted to him by his grandmother. In addition, he also instructed them about various hygiene measures that were imperative while using clothes, like using a disinfectant while washing and proper sun-drying before use.

“While using clothes also reduced the impact on the environment, it also cut down on the financial burden on the women,” he says.

The Future

An ardent follower of Swami Vivekananda, Jha believes in making the villages self-sufficient.

“I don’t want any community to be dependent on me. Whenever I spent nearly six months in any village, I ensure to educate them to the extent that they are not dependent on me in the future,” Jha says.

“I work on the philosophy of Swami Vivekananda, who said, “If you downpour the entire world economy in one village, that village won’t progress unless and until they don’t want to stand on their own feet”,” he adds.

Realising that his efforts alone cannot bring about change, he sought the intervention of the government in championing his cause. In about 5-6 villages, he worked with Asha and Anganwadi workers to mentor adolescents.

“While the government has several programs to provide free pads in schools, I want it to be channelised through these Asha workers, who will work as mentors to these adolescents. They will talk to the kids and their mothers to help bust the myths around menstruation,” he explains.

“As these mentors talk to the kids during each cycle of their menstruation, they would eventually be educated enough to buy sanitary pads and take care of their health on their own. This is what I envision for my state and my country,” Jha adds.

“I want the government to set up manufacturing units in some villages through SHGs (Self Help Groups). However, it should be strictly ensured that the pads produced should be biodegradable. This will also provide a livelihood to the villagers,” he says.

Stressing the need for women empowerment, Jha adds, “Women empowerment does not happen when just one or two women in a village get educated and get a good job or achieve a huge milestone. Women empowerment is not complete unless and until every woman in a village is empowered.”

Spread the love

What keeps you driving?

For Meera, it is the smile, satisfaction, and confidence that she gets to see on the face of her amazing folks every time she meets them — the sense of gratitude and the art of being self-reliable!

What started 8 years back with one centre in a city turned into 100s of centres across 22 states and a family of 160 people.

Meera Shenoy, 60, started Youth4Jobs with a dream of making young India self-reliable despite all the odds and conditions like physical/ hearing/ speech disability. It was her sheer dedication and love for others that made her initiative recognized by people across the world as well as the government.

According to Equiv.in, ‘only 34 lakh of the about 1.34 crore people with disabilities (PwDs) in the employable age have a job in India’ — an unemployment rate of more than 70%.

“I decided to focus on youth with disabilities, as 80% of the world’s disabled people are in developing nations like India,” Meera says. She started the country’s first skilling mission for the government of Andhra Pradesh, EJMM, for rural development which became very successful and influenced the policies of the government further. After that, she also consulted for the World Bank across south-east Asia and the United Nations before starting Youth4Jobs.

“We started with very little money but a lot of passion. When we looked around, we realized there was no one training youth with disabilities coming from rural areas — and I felt that was the real need. We did the first residential training program for youth with disabilities and faced a lot of challenges. We had to find differently-abled youth from rural areas, the companies had to understand their needs while recruiting them — so we started the All India Connect team — to help companies hiring differently-abled youth,” Meera tells about the initial phase of the foundation.

There are three major programs that Youth4Jobs offer —

The Village Connect
The College Connect
WISE

Youth4Jobs trains the rural youth with disabilities for two months, without any fees, in which they help them in developing their life skills, communication skills, computer skills, etc. and helps them in getting a job in different services sectors like retail, BPO, hospitality, logistics, etc.

She also has a dedicated team that keeps on checking the current job vacancies and helps the youths in getting a job. The government is also very supportive, and the state/ district level officials help them in reaching out to the interior parts of the villages.

“These young people coming from low-income families are seen as a burden. But a lot of them who we trained actually became the highest-earning member of their family and the whole community started looking at them with respect,” Meera shared the plight of the rural youth with disabilities. “We have trained girls who are financially weak, differently-abled, and hail from villages — for them, getting a job actually made them economically empowered — gave a voice to stand for themselves. Such things keep me energized — the magic of ‘before and after’ — keeps me going,” she further continued.

On asking how the people in remote parts treat the person with any disability, Meera tells that their attitude towards a differently-abled is appalling and they do not think that they are capable of earning or doing any job.

And as the parents of these young people start getting older, their worry for their differently-abled kid increases, as the rest of the family may not look after the kid in the future. Youth4Jobs helps such families and ensures that the kids can rely on themselves.

The CSR arm of different companies helps the NGO in surviving financially. As of writing this, Youth4Jobs have trained 23,240 youths with disabilities — including online training and is the biggest NGO in south-east Asia.

Because of the lockdown, they had to close down their residential training centers but increased the online training sessions to help the youth in finding jobs. “We had set-up helplines for assistance, helped visually impaired young people and others, and also did relief operations to tackle the lockdown effects, but we also continued doing what we do. Though a lot of people don’t have a smartphone, they had to borrow and attend the training sessions. Our trainers and mentors have to teach them a lot of things as most of them are not well-versed with smartphones. We introduced online video calling apps to them and also helped them to understand the basics of online work,” Meera talks about the recent challenges that her team faced. When most of the skill development activities are at a standstill due to COVID-19 and the subsequent economic slowdown, Youth4Jobs is scaling its skilling and placing in jobs a vulnerable segment — youth with disabilities.

“When you become a social entrepreneur, you make a choice — a choice of keeping others before you. I like the fact that our work is highly impactful — we try to give differently-abled youths a voice that they dream of and enable them to give back to society,” speaks Meera as she puts the interview to an end. She urges everyone to help in building a young inclusive India, where everyone has an equal opportunity for education and employment.