 |
| We ALL bleed. |
If men are done away with the biological need to defecate (only men), how many of our houses would still have toilets?
According to world bank data, the ratio of female to male labor force participation rate in India is on the decline for the past two decades (from 40 plus percent to 34 percent as of 2016) while this ratio is on the ascent for many other countries, developed as well as under-developed ones.
The current female vs male population ratio in India is 945 females for every 1000 males. Actually, women are gaining on men for the past two decades and they are about to hit parity.
On a stand alone basis, these two ratios are, well, just ratios and does not convey much (though the former ratio is a bit skewed as it does not consider our 'kitchen warriors' as labor force).
If we put them together, then a disturbing trend emerges; while female population is growing, working female pool is declining!
Why?
Though the patriarchal mindset is touted as a predominant reason, I suspect a much larger issue is in play that lies undetected / unrecognised though we claim to be a ever progressive society on all things fashionable.
You see, Women menstruate! How can they work in public places with such a huge handicap when we are not willing to do anything to make life easier for them in these places when they need it most?!
If men start menstruating, how many of our houses and offices would have facilities to 'comfortably accommodate' them?
Menstruation, the taboo surrounding it (m.women are not allowed entry into temples in many parts of India even today), the collective unwillingness to treat this as a 'normal' thing and lack of will (social, political, personal, you name it!) to provide means to help these women survive and thrive in public spaces even when they bleed, is one of the biggest miseries that has engulfed our ancient nation.
Not long ago when women did not have much space to work in public, they were mostly confined (by choice or by dictum) to their houses and cotton roll was handy to see them through those days of misery. Cotton was good, it was washable and so reusable too. Their education mostly ended when they attained puberty and that had a telling effect in sectors where they could be gainfully employed. Motherhood as a reason for non-employability was always secondary.
With economic liberalisation everywhere, more and more women went for higher education and joined the mainstream workforce in the last quarter of a century while none of the limiting factors changed much. Of course, cotton gave way to disposable napkins and that gave them 'freedom of movement' to choose their education as well as career. Did the public mindset and public spaces also grow with them? NO!
Buying a napkin pack is still a 'hush hush' task. Women would buy only if the shop attendee is a woman, which is not the case yet in many many shops. So predominantly men buy these for their women folk from men who sell these at most of the shops and they still wrap the pack with newspaper before putting it into a plastic bag, to 'protect' the 'honour' of the guy buying it. Alcohol is sold in the open in bold fashion by the way!
(A couple of weeks back I took my son to a nearby departmental store to buy a pack of napkins for the women in my house. When I approached the guy at the counter and asked him to bill what I carried, he behaved like he was dealing contraband and insisted on wrapping it in news paper. I refused, allowed my son to carry it in his hands, unwrapped, when we walked out of the store to the dismay of that counter guy.)
Social taboo, amped up by collective apathy meant loss of attendance for girl children in many many schools across India (this three day per month - I wonder who came up with this quota! It can vary from three to even fifteen days...pity them, girls...). Their learning is stunted, many of them drop out from high school just because they bleed and can't hide; many of them can't afford packs of napkins and cotton is not good to use in school as changing it regularly as well as handling the used up roll is hell of a task. They simply take leave of absence and fail miserably to catch up as the absence window is usually not in their control...
Many schools and colleges are gingerly trying to address this problem by providing napkin vending machines and incinerators (to burn the used napkins) within the school premises but their reluctance often shows in un-stocked vending machines and non functional incinerators. As I type this, there are many many schools in my city itself that have neither vending machines nor incinerators in their premises. Sadly, schools or well healed also are reluctant to provide such facilities.
If schools fail, the society also fails. Can you spot a single public toilet in our country that you would allow your women to use willingly? Forget about these places having vending machines and incinerators.
Almost all of us women living in this great nation are subconsciously tuned to the idea of using news papers to roll up used napkins and dispose them in public garbage bins (when we are not flushing them down the drains or not burning them secretly to pollute the very air we breath) without any second thought. Just to let you know, most of the garbage pickers do not even have protective gloves and come in contact directly with these bio waste as part of their daily work... A recent statistics states that we discard close to 20 million napkins every single day and most of them end up in landfills (never mind those stray dogs that pull most of them out from garbage bins and spread them on our roads)! Just imagine an archeologist digging up our soil somewhere in the distant future to discover the glorious civilizations of the past only to come up with tons and tons of used napkins and discarded plastic bags...sigh...
90 percent of the materials used to make these napkins are byproducts of crude oil; Plastic! At the core of every commercial napkin is a chemical gel called SAP (Super Absorbent Polymers) that can hold fluids few hundred times its volume. This gel can invade your body when you use these napkins, the harmful effect of it not yet (ovarian cancer to name one) fully understood. These SAPs also take a long long time to disintegrate but that too after leaching into soil and contaminating everything in it!
Worried minds world over are experimenting with various options like reusable cotton pads (for home use) and napkins made using natural materials (for use while in a public space) / silicone cups etc...
Till they succeed in bringing up a combo that would allow women folk navigate their private and public worlds freely, seamlessly and safely, we would have to break our heads to mitigate the risks of these bio waste in a socially and environmentally responsible manner.
In the Indian context, I see a pragmatic way to help our women to survive these issues:
Public spaces:
1. Mandate profit making corporates to spend a certain percentage of their profits every year (CSR) towards providing sanitary napkins and incinerators in all schools of this great nation and maintenance of the same 8 hours a day * 6 days as week * 365 days an year. Ideally these Corporates can extend their generosity by gifting the girl students adequate carry home packs that would see them through their 'off school time woes' too.
2. Mandate every office to provide these two facilities (functional) as part of their employment offer to women.
3. Mandate every commercial establishment to provide these two facilities as part of their licence approvals and renewals.
4. Public toilets - most of our country men pee in public wherever they 'have to' and women hold it up till they reach a hygienic toilet, mostly private ones due to the utter failure of our administration to provide functional, hygienic public toilets for its denizens. So I am not going to wish for any change in this space in the near future.
5. Mandate every Primary Health Centre in villages to provide low cost napkins to their women population and maintain adequate incinerators to burn the bio waste safely within the PHC premise.
6. In towns and cities, mandate the governing cleaning bodies to provide adequate bins / incinerators to safely deposit bio waste in every street.
Private Spaces:
It is the responsibility of every individual to safely discard the bio waste from ones household either by depositing it in the designated bin in respective streets or get a domestic incinerator, install in ones bathroom and educate the ladies to use them, as simple as that!
If a Mixer / Grinder is indispensable in every household because it makes life easier for women in our homes, what about a Mixer / Grinder sized (and similarly priced) incinerator that would make them happier?
Heck, why not!
This thought was the trigger for my search for such a portable cum affordable machine for use in my home. I wanted to buy such a machine, install and use it in my house and share the results with my neighbourhood to spread the awareness as soon as possible. I must admit that this epiphany was a result of my search for efficient waste disposal rather than due to my concern on the bleeding women folk until a certain point in time in my life; such is the conditioning of our society :-(
I asked around, visited local factories, googled, talked to many many providers from various corners of our country but I have not stumbled upon what I am looking for, yet. I summarise my trials and tribulations with these folks below:
A. Most of the firms making incinerators target only big institutions.
B. Those few that do make portable machines sell them at exorbitant cost. What about 9500 bucks for a portable one for up to two women users?
C. Very few firms in this space are run by women. Even they are reluctant to 'even consider' providing such a low cost portable machine though I told almost all of them that the market size in India alone is roughly 30 Crore 'eligible' users!
D. A Gujarati Business man came up with a terracotta incinerator a few years back but there seems to be not many takers as sparse information is available in the web about his products even today. After many many inquiries I identified a seller in Assam who is willing to ship me one for domestic use at the cost of approx. 6000 bucks but he can't make it any lower.
E. For all the noise about our professional students 'not industry-ready when they finish their degree programs' / 'not ready to face the real life', none of them are willing to work on such a problem to provide a solution that I am looking for though I am willing to sponsor their project and commercialize it. Even girl students in many institutions I approached refused to consider this as they don't find it cool!
Undeterred, I keep looking for that elusive solution, like Bikram walking with the troublesome Betal in his shoulders.
No comments:
Post a Comment