Irfana Begum, 45, said she was surprised when an ASHA worker came to her house with a pack of sanitary pads for ₹6 in early 2020 for her 18-year-old daughter.
“If we are buying a packet from outside it costs around 40 rupees. It was a good scheme and was helpful to us, but we have not been getting it for a long time now,” Ms. Begum said at her house in an unauthorised colony in Sarai Kale Khan.
Her daughter, Iqra, who is now 19 years old, is mentally unwell and has studied only till class five, and her husband has been out of work for the last two years.
Under the government’s Udaan scheme, like Iqra, 30,000 out-of-school girls used to get a pack of six sanitary pads for ₹6 a month.
But the scheme has stopped for the past 16 months as the government has not floated a tender for new suppliers, according to ASHA workers and officials.
Most of the beneficiaries of the scheme are from economically backward backgrounds.
The scheme has not been functional from April 2020, around the time when the pandemic hit the city. “It has been restructured to give 10 sanitary pads free of cost to about 70,000 out of school girls a month, including some students in municipal schools. A new tender for procuring the sanitary pads as per the revised BIS standards is yet to be floated,” a Delhi government official said.
When contacted, a Delhi government spokesperson did not offer a comment on why the scheme is not operational.
In December 2019, the Delhi High Court had asked the Delhi government and civic bodies to keep providing sanitary pads for free to school-going girls and those who dropped out and continue with their awareness programmes and schemes to promote menstrual hygiene.
Surbhi Singh, a gynaecologist and founder of Sacchi Saheli, an NGO working for women’s health and education, said that they have been distributing sanitary pads and have found that there is a need for pads in poor households.
“Many times, men in the family, who are breadwinners, think of sanitary pads as a luxury and something that is avoidable. Women are dependent in many cases and have to suffer because of this. Sanitary pads are needed for better hygiene,” Dr. Singh said.
“If there are funds for the scheme, then it is not acceptable that the government is not distributing the pads. In Scotland, sanitary pads are given for free to every woman. But in India, it is not given for free to even poor people,” she added.
Hygiene scheme
It is part of the Central government’s Menstrual Hygiene Scheme (MHS), wherein funds are given to State governments to purchase the sanitary pads. The scheme was implemented under the name of Udaan by the Delhi government from April 2019. Though the target was to reach 50,000 adolescent girls a month, the government was able to distribute it to about 30,000 girls on an average.
The scheme was also aimed at creating awareness about safe and hygienic menstrual health practices.
After the scheme was started in 2019, the Delhi government decided to increase the number of pads to 10 from six and also give the pads for free. The contract, which was signed in 2019 with a private company, expired in March 2020.
