About half of the women in Jammu and Kashmir still use native cloth to protect themselves from menstruation.
Doctors said that the main problem is not how much it costs, but how little people know about it. They said that more people should know about this.
Dr. Auqfeen Nisar, who works for the Government Medical College in Srinagar and is stationed in the Ganderbal area in central Kashmir, said that she has been doing a hospital-based study on this topic and has made a questionnaire. She also used crowd-funding to help poor people get menstrual pads.
“I see that about seven out of ten women use pads to protect themselves during their periods, while two or three still use traditional methods,” she said. “In Srinagar, things were like they were in Ganderbal.”
Dr. Auqfeen said that if we did a house-to-house survey, we would find that about half of the women were using pads. She added, “I’ve been working on this for years, and I’ve seen that affordability isn’t a problem, but lack of awareness is. Even women who are using pads don’t know why they are using them; they just use them because they are ready-made.”
“Even if we give them free pads, they will only use them that one time. Once we stop giving them pads, they will go back to the old ways,” she said.
Dr. Nisar said that there needs to be a meeting for women in the neighbourhood. “We’re hoping that it will be good for these women.
Officials said that there is a government programme that gives women of childbearing age 10 pads for Rs 10, but these pads aren’t good enough to use properly.
Many doctors said that the problem needs to be fixed because it is important for them to use pads. Clothes can be used if you take certain steps, which they said are almost hard to take.
The doctors said that women who are having their periods won’t get infections or other problems if they use pads. They said, though, that J-K is a lot better in this way than other states.
According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), almost 60% of women in Jammu and Kashmir still use cloth to protect themselves from menstruation.
According to the study (2019-2021), only 50.5% of women between the ages of 15 and 24 use tampons. In NFHS-4 (2015-2016), the number was 48.8%, but it had grown since then.
The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare made a plan to teach girls ages 10 to 19 in rural places how to take care of themselves during their periods. “Freedays” is the name of the brand of sanitary napkins that come in packs of six.
