56 DU Colleges Got Free Sanitary Napkin Vending Machines, Thanks To This Miranda House Student

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Our country has progressed in every possible field except one - dealing with issues like the availability of affordable sanitary pads. Even today, a huge number of women don’t use sanitary napkins or are too shy to even talk about this. This seriously is an alarming situation. And during all this abject unawareness about real issues facing women, there is one girl who had the willpower to make a change. Read on as we tell you about her!

Delhi University’s Padwoman | A graduate from Miranda House, Mahamedhaa Nagar, secretary, Delhi University Students Union (DUSU), was very disturbed seeing the sorry state DU was in - with no medical rooms or even a nurse who would have basic first aid implements and sanitary napkins for the students. Students shied away from asking for napkins even from their own classmates! And in such a scenario, she decided to install sanitary napkin vending machines in every DU college. And we applaud her initiative! 

She started this Herculean task by organising a women’s marathon for tax-free sanitary napkins, which was flagged off by Akshay Kumar himself. She later realised that the problem wasn’t only limited to the availability of these vending machines but their quality too. There were some colleges which did have machines, but the quality of the napkins dispensed was questionable. 

An NGO called CSR Foundation helped Mahamedhaa in getting sponsors for the sanitary napkin vending machines, that cost somewhere between Rs 20,000 to Rs 25,000. She has, till now, installed 56 sanitary vending machines in different DU colleges and that’s an amazing feat! Mahamedhaa is now planning to install sanitary napkin incinerators at all DU colleges. 

So now all a girl has to do is insert 5 bucks into the vending machine and a pad will come out of it automatically. The money collected by selling these pads will then be utilised to buy another set of sanitary napkins to stock inside the machine. 

Thanks to Mahamedhaa, women will now have easy (and affordable) access to sanitary napkins and will become aware of the need to take menstrual health seriously. Great job, Mahamedhaa! We hope all of us can one day contribute as much as she has done to society. 

Sourced Via NDTV