On March 24, 2020, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that the whole nation of 1.3 billion people needs a complete lockdown during the midnight hours to deter the further spread of the coronavirus. With the global crisis, pandemic, and nationwide lockdown people are going through- Physical, Financial, Mental, and Emotional agony. Apart from all these hurdles, one more struggle that the Women Population across the globe is dealing with their monthly cycles and bleeding during this health crisis.

Covid-19 has silently hit women and their cycles hard. It made menstrual health more urgent than ever. Coronavirus has disrupted the menstrual supply chain between the government schemes and the women who can’t afford sanitary napkins.

In this period of the pandemic access to sanitary pads and menstrual hygiene products has increased significantly. The gap between those who can afford to clean water, menstrual hygiene products, and personal space and those who cannot is constantly increasing during a lockdown.

Those who can pay for reserve products like Pads and tampons have done so, leaving others and particularly- lower-income women without supplies. When pads and tampons aren’t supplied in shelters women often turn up to age-old methods using ripped T-shirts and old clothes, which carry health risks.         

A report that came out by WHO showed that 70% of the workforce is female which also indicates that a large chunk of the population has to fight with their menstrual cycle as much as they have to fight against the virus as this virus impacts the access to the ability to maintain hygiene during periods in privacy and with dignity for millions of girls and women.

 

In slums areas, women are more dependent on community toilets and it’s also difficult for women migrants to manage their periods on the tough and long road home without access to any type of hygiene products. More than one in ten women already struggled to afford basic period supplies each month and the pandemic has now caused panic.

There is the door-to-door distribution of masks going on in many regions but no idea about sanitary napkins. The whole focus has been moved to the distribution of masks and sanitizers and nobody is speaking about menstrual hygiene which must fall in the category of basic needs too. It is important to protect ourselves from the deadly virus but the monthly menstrual flow is not aware of what exactly a pandemic is. 800 million Women menstruate around the world. Menstrual hygiene is as basic as a human right. Women and girls always remain in the category of the most suffered ones in this pandemic too.

Many NGOs are providing essential supplies and groceries during this time but the sanitary requirements of women have been ignored or not even being considered. The pandemic only exacerbates this. The department of women and child development examined ways to give sanitary napkins to women in the crisis which have been discussed in the following part of the article.             

Many female students studying in standard 6 to 12 in government schools across the country recite the same suffering. They are provided sanitary napkins every month under the central government’s Kishor Shakti Yojna.

The same type of hygiene care with your sanitary products needs to be practice while you are practicing vigilant hand washing and sanitizing around the houses due to Covid-19. Attention should be paid to ensure women in rural communities in India have access to pads during the lockdown. Information on making, using, and maintaining homemade cloths safely should be given by the proper authority.

We have to be sure that there’s always a surplus supply of feminine hygiene products when disasters or other health crises strike.

“Periods don’t stop for Pandemics, for hurricanes or any other natural disaster. They don’t stop for poverty, they don’t stop for trauma, and they don’t stop just because we don’t have access to products”.